The App I Built So I'd Never Miss the Light Again
- Sylvain Petit
- 9 hours ago
- 2 min read
Watch on YouTube:
After weeks of brutal back-to-back heatwaves kept me off the trails, I finally got out scouting again — as I do most summers. But this video isn't just about the hike. It's about a problem every landscape photographer eventually runs into, and the app I ended up building to solve it.
The scouting problem
As a landscape photographer who isn't shooting full-time, you rarely get to choose to go out when the light is right. And in the summer, sunrises comes early, sunsets come late, and most days the sky is just a bright, flat blue, all of this can be tricky to balance with a full time job... Scouting — finding compositions ahead of time and knowing exactly when to come back — is one of the most important (and least talked about) skills in this craft.
For years I had two recurring struggles: staying motivated enough to get up for a sunrise or hold out for a sunset, and — just as often — not knowing where to go to fit the conditions I actually had that day.
From notebook to spreadsheet to app
My tracking system evolved the slow way: first a paper notebook of locations and rough conditions, then pins on Google Maps (which quickly became unreadable — no photos, no notes, no way to filter), then a spreadsheet tying it all together. It worked, but it was clunky and not something I enjoyed opening.
So I built myself an app: a library of saved locations, each tagged with the season, time of day, and weather conditions that suit it best. The part I'm proudest of is the Finder — pick the conditions you're stuck with today (say, spring, midday, overcast), set a driving radius, and it ranks your saved spots by how well they match. No more digging through a pile of notes trying to remember which location wants which light.
I'm sharing it with you
I've been using this app constantly and enjoying it enough that I thought other landscape photographers might get real use out of it too. It's now available on the site : one payment gives a download link and license key, no subscription. The channel isn't monetized and I don't run sponsors, so you could say I'm sponsoring myself with this one!
The rest of the outing was pure scouting in practice: no dramatic sunset, just logging new spots for later. One find worth mentioning — a lone tree perched on a cliff. Wrong orientation for that evening's light, but flagged in the app now for a partly-cloudy or stormy sunrise, any season but winter, since the access gets genuinely dangerous once it snows.
That's the whole point of scouting: most of it isn't glamorous. It's quiet, unglamorous groundwork so that when the light finally does line up, you already know exactly where to be. See you out there!
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