Using Google earth Pro to Plan a Photo Trip

hello Blake critias here with everyday HDR and HDR insider and today we're gonna take a magical little trip here into Google Earth and show how you can use Google Earth to plan out a photo trip to the point that you can predict where you're going to need to put you or tripod at the exact time on the exact day that you're going to be in that location to shoot anything you want from sunsets even to the Milky Way this is one heck of a tutorial so strap yourselves in and get yourself some Google Earth and let's go ahead and take a flight over to Cannon Beach Oregon so times have certainly changed since I used to plan my little photo excursions what I used to do is go to Flickr or 500px type the location of where I was gonna go look at other people's pictures and try to find them on a map and typically I would I would be I'd be pretty much lost there wasn't much that I can do there but here in Google Earth Pro we have 3d visuals of the entire world I mean this is this is a game changer for a photographer who's trying to plan a trip especially because now I've already scouted all of the locations that I want to shoot here in Oregon so here I am already at Oregon I've gone to several of the places that are on my pinpointed Google Earth Map already because I already set forth and did the pre-planning ahead of time so all I had to do is pack my bag go to Oregon check into my hotel and start going to the points that I've plotted so there's a ton of stuff to to try and show you here in Google Earth and Google Earth really has more than I can show you in a quick 10 to 15 minute how to plan a trip tutorial so really you kind of just have to download it and get into it and just get your hands dirty with it like I'll tell you you can probably spend two three four five six hours just scouting the entire globe and we aren't just talking America here this is all over the other day I was looking at the Eiffel Tower it's it's it's crazy so over here on the left-hand side you're gonna see your typical Google search options so here I could type something in and I could search it down here you're gonna see different like if I've made a pinpoint on this map which I'll show you how to do that I can navigate to any one of those pinpoints at any time and then on the lower level you're going to see different layers and we'll talk about those layers as we go through at the top you have your toolbar this is where you can add things to your own personal Google map so that when you add a pin you can always go back to that pin whenever you want so we'll talk about the pins we're gonna be talking about the rulers and we're also gonna be talking about the daytime nighttime camera so let's go ahead and go to Cannon Beach Oregon because that's where we are Cannon Beach Oregon it already starts popping up so if I press ok and go to search it's gonna go ahead and magically navigate me right down into Cannon Beach Oregon now we can see right here just from a bird's eye topographical view all of the different places here so we talked about those layers on the left hand side if we want to remove any of those places objects and things like hotel rooms we can take away that places option we can also if we wanted to take away the photos but here we are as photographers wanting to see what other photographers have taken of this area so if i zoom in close here and go to where we have haystack rock you can see that this coast is littered with pictures so I can click here and say oh that's what haystack rock looks like it's sunset because somebody's already taken that picture so now I can already start to plan where I want to set myself up when I go out for my trip so we can we can take away the photos if we want to take away any distractions and we can also take away any borders and labels and that'll take away any distractions so if you want to look at Google Earth with a distraction-free environment you could do it that way also right here if you take this hide sidebar you're only going to see Google Earth taking up your entire screen which is really awesome so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to open that because we're gonna need to use that so one of the places that I wanted to visit was this place called The Devil's cauldron and it's not too far from Cannon Beach it's pretty foot pretty south about ten miles south so what I can actually do is go up here and type in Devil's cauldron organ and it will magically navigate me to the devil's cauldron in Oregon and it really looks a lot farther away than what you're seeing it was laying about 10 miles or so so here if I want to see what other people have shot of this area I'd click that photos option and see that what this area actually looks like it looks like a pretty cool area for me to go ahead and photograph we got a lot of trees and some ocean more like a higher up view I might not be able to get on the coast here but at least I know that now going into this so one of the things I need to look for if I'm gonna shoot Devil's cauldron and when I say shoot I'm talking about photograph is a place to park so if i zoom in right down here I can see that this is the place that I want to park so if I want to I can grab a pin and add a place marker right here and I rename this place marker to park here I know that I need to park here okay and now I need to know just how far of a walk is it gonna be for me to walk from this parking location to this area where I might be able to take a picture so let me just go ahead up here to the ruler tool you're gonna see a ruler up here and what this ruler is saying is how do you want to do this do you want to make a line for for our measurement or do you want to make a path I want to make a path so I'll click right here to where I'm gonna park my car hoping that I got the best parking spot in that area and I'm just gonna go ahead and start making several points and as you click because we're on a path it will just start creating these points for me as we go through and right here you can see that I want to do this by miles you can do by feet miles kilometers meters however you want to do it kilometres kilometers all right so we'll go to miles and I'll just go ahead and add another point here all the way until about here where I can walk now that's gonna be a roundabout type of estimate I but at least now I know that it from the parking area to the vantage point that I want to photograph it's going to be about a quarter of a mile and I can go even farther than that and look at the elevation profile and see from which point the elevation is gonna be as I'm walking along that path so that's pretty cool so I know that there's gonna be a slight variation in elevation as I walk from the area of parking to the area that I want a photograph so that is pretty incredible so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna press save and I'll save this as a walking path to Cauldron press okay and now if i zoom in down here I'm gonna go ahead and make myself another place marker so that I know that this is going to be where two photo shoot one so I know that that's gonna be one of the places that I want to take my photo shoot at so if I by any stretch of how I'm navigating around Google Earth I get lost let's say I just go back to Cannon Beach it's gonna take me magically wisping back to Cannon Beach and here is Cannon Beach if I needed to ever go back to that Devil's cauldron area I could just double click on one of these points and that that point would show me how to get there now I told you that was only about ten miles to get to Devil's cauldron from Cannon Beach let's go ahead and check it we can get directions so we'll go from Cannon Beach to Devil's if I could spell to be great and we'll get directions and now it's gonna map out that entire path for me so it looks like 10.8 miles from Cannon Beach all the way down to Devil's cauldron so I've already got that already mapped out that's trip number one okay so now let's make this a little bit more interesting let's go ahead and cancel our search results here if I wanted to I could email this to myself like a print it but we're just gonna head and cancel this for now and let's make sure the terrain is selected so it's very important to make sure that terrain is selected because now we're gonna take a little cruise along the beach so I'm gonna zoom in down here and I've already scoped out this Coast pretty well so I know pretty much exactly where it is that I want to shoot so I'm gonna go and navigate up a little bit right here to where it says bird rocks because this seems like a really interesting place to do sunset shoots either right here at Bird rocks or maybe even sea lion Rock let's look at bird rockers so we'll zoom in down here and as i zoom in you see that the terrain starts to kind of develop as i zoom in now if I press the control ctrl key and then pulled down on my mouse it's like flying so as I pull down on the mouse it makes me look up it's I was never very good at that flying thing so you can see here that now I can almost look at where I want my tripod to be now if you press ctrl and then move the wheel bar on your mouse move that little wheel and as you move that down or up it will rotate you and navigate you around the area so I'm navigating around and if I click and drag on the map I can kind of grab and see where I want to be let's say I want to shoot this rock alright so I'm gonna get in even closer so I'm just gonna release control and just zoom right on in here and then pull my view up so now I can see the sky and why this is important is because I don't want to know kind of what this place is gonna look like at certain times of the day so what I can do is I can click right here with says show sunlight across the landscape and use the time slider for the time of day so right now it's defaulting to my time of day so if I move this to the left a little bit it'll show me kind of what the light is going to look like as I'm there on the scene even to the point that I get shadows on the landscape so if I want to plan out my shooting my sunset sunrise and in just daytime landscape shooting in general I know for a fact that 1 o'clock in the afternoon might not be a very good time to shoot and sure enough the lighting isn't that great but as I move this over I can see what times of day start to look better as I navigate this over even to the point that I'm seeing stars now so let's take a look around because it looks like the Milky Way might be around here somewhere so there's the Milky Way there's a really small sliver of the Milky Way and that's kind of like the faint part of the Milky Way but if let's say 8 or 9 o'clock I go out there I can catch the very tail end of the Milky Way at this spot where that bird rock is and I can even look around even more if I want to I can look around the sky and see where the biggest portion of that Milky Way he's gonna beat and at what time it's gonna be so if I'm you know really interested in Milky Way shooting which I am I can actually navigate around here I I know I already know that it's gonna be on this side so that's why I kind of turned my my perspective a little bit there it moves very fast so you kind of gotta go a little slow with it but at about it looks like 1:00 a.m. 11:45 I might be able to catch more of it on this end let's see what happens if we navigate a little bit farther over in time as we navigate that over in time we get to see about where that's gonna be and this is my time zone that I'm in now so we're looking at the Milky Way along the coast at my time zone that's 852 in the morning which would actually be about 650 2:00 in the morning there so maybe before the Sun rises I might be able to catch a little bit of that Milky Way right there on the shore that is pretty awesome actually I can't say sure sure is an East Coast thing sorry about that that's my East Coast routes coming out I never even like the word Shore I was a jersey thing sorry Jersey people but you can see that you can actually plan out exactly where you want to place your tripod when you go to shoot to me this is absolutely especially cuz I'm gonna be planning the trip so let's just go ahead and go back to one of those points so now with the terrain selected here and we go back to our Devil's cauldron you see how it navigated me there I can see exactly what this coastline looks like and how the coast is definitely gonna be inaccessible for me because I'm not gonna be spelunking or climbing any any cliffs I guess here going any cave diving or anything to try and get a good shot I'll leave that up to the crazy people I've got a wife and kids now but maybe I would be able to get a shot over here on this coast and again I could find a road that will lead me to there and see just how far it would be to walk and that would be a good way to analyze how much gear I want to bring with me how light do I want to pack is this gonna be something that I can just park right there on the coast and walk to the coast and not have to walk too far with all my gear well I'm not gonna need my hiking bag for this one so we can zoom on out and see that that is Smuggler's Cove and one of the best parts about this not only can I plan my entire trip I can already see what other people have taken pictures of around this area so this is South Arcadia beach I know that's gonna be a pretty cool point to take a picture and I can just start plotting stuff here there and everywhere there's a coastal fall right here how would I have known that if I didn't click there so I'm actually gonna make a point there I like that it's going to make a point right here coastal we'll call it coastal waterfall the really cool thing WEP is the it's satellite imagery so if you get really bored you can find a car party like I found here that and people are actually parked their vehicles right here on the beach and are having themselves a nice little party on the beach with their cars and probably up to no good but that's just the coast one of the most amazing things about this is that I can go to places that I've never been before in my entire life like the Grand Canyon I know I've never been there I need to go there let's just go ahead and press ENTER on finding the Grand Kane and it's gonna magically whispy anybody to the Grand Canyon and with terrain selected I can be navigating inside the Grand Canyon this to me is just absolutely incredible I'm already there you've never been there but look at that I'm navigating through the Grand Canyon it gets even better you can go anywhere you want I'm gonna go to my hometown here actually it's not my hometown it's just where I live Kansas City Missouri check that out imagine being magically whisked away to I don't know if I have any Wayne's World fans out there but when I was younger we lived in Illinois look at that I'm in Kansas City right now I'm looking at buildings that are in Kansas City as I Drive through Kansas City even buildings under construction we've got a crane here look at that that is absolutely phenomenal very cool when I was younger I lived in Illinois and then we were told that we had to move to Delaware and we watched Wayne's World and there's a part in Wayne's world where they're like imagine being magically whisked away to Delaware and they're like hi we're in Delaware same thing you can be magically whisked away to Delaware and that's what I kind of consider home that's where all my family is so I could plan a nice little photo excursion trip to Delaware there's probably not gonna be any three-dimensional terrain because it's actually a rather flat state it's got some stuff up north so the next time you plan on taking yourself on a little excursion I highly recommend taking a look at Google Earth first and the reason being is because you can either plot out your entire trip or you can look at pictures that other people have taken for the exact location that you're gonna be going to and kind of get an idea of what you want to shoot it's absolutely incredible we live in a time where anything is possible and we're seeing it here we can three dimensionally map out where we want to be where we want to even place our tripod not even ten years ago could we have done this maybe ten years ago what it wouldn't have been in this accurate twenty years ago thirty years ago wouldn't even been heard of again my name is Blake Curtis of everyday HDR and HDR insider and if you saw this helpful go ahead and subscribe leave a comment in the comment section below have you used Google Earth to plan out a photo trip how did it work out for you was it something that when you made the plans that it worked out to be pretty accurate to to the location that you shot I'm pretty curious because I still haven't been to all the places that I have mapped out yet on my trip to Oregon we live in a really crazy time when pretty much anything is possible and this just goes to show you what we're capable of doing so thanks for stopping by and have fun with Google Earth

Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 12,994

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Planning a photography Trip, how to, plan a a photoshoot, plana a landscape shoot like a pro, landsacpe photo trip, planning a photo trip best practices

Id: 0Le_-gwPu-c

Length: 18min 4sec (1084 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 05 2015