As a landscape photographer it's very important to understand the weather. When you have a picture in your head you need to know when it's the best time to go out and make that awesome picture. But how do you know when to go out? Is it just luck or is it possible to calculate when the perfect moment will come? In this blog I will explain how I plan my landscape photo's.

What's the idea?

The first part of making a landscape photo is creating an idea. I have a location and I know what sort kind of composition I would like to shoot. Then it's time to plan when it's the perfect moment to go. First of al: the perfect moment doesn't have to be at sunrise or sunset. When it's cloudy at noon there are enough opportunity's to shoot amazing landscape photo's. Don't let anyone say it isn't possible to shoot good picture during the day, when the sun is high in the sky.

The first thing I do is check where the sun will be at the time I'd like to shoot the photo. Because of the different season's the sun will rise and set at different angles each day/month/season. Also the time the sun sets and rises differs. So I check at which time during the year the sun sets or rises at the correct angle to create that perfect composition. After I determined the time and the day comes closer I take a look at the weather reports.

Weather reports

Every landscape photographer should be able to read weather reports. This part is vital. Why? Well because the sky in your idea must match the weather in reality. And therefor weather reports are essential. You don't want to go outside when low clouds are jamming the sun and you are looking for a sunset composition. Every country had its own weather institute. In The Netherlands it's called KNMI. This institute provides current weather information and predicts the weather for the next hours and days. I mainly use https://weerlive.nl. This website provides the necessary information I need. Which is: temperature, dew point, cloud location, visibility, humidity, and rain-forecast. With these parameters it should be easy to predict when the perfect weather for my photo will come.

When I'm looking for fog I check the temperature and dew point. The dew point is the temperature to which air must be cooled to become saturated with water vapor. When cooled further, the airborne water vapor will condense to form liquid water. When air cools to its dew point through contact with a surface that is colder than the air, water will condense on the surface. In combination with high humidity it means fog. So when the outside temperature is lower than the dew point and there is a high humidity, go out!

To get these epic orange clouds during sunsets you are looking for high clouds. Make sure no low clouds are present and blocking the view for the high clouds. Get there one our before the sun will set and you will be guaranteed for some amazing skies the next 2 hours. Make sure you have the right composition!

It it then all pure forecasts? Well sometimes it's just luck. Weather forecasting is a difficult job and sometimes even the weather institutes are wrong. In that case...Next time better luck... ;)