To a landscape photographer, knowing the time of sunrise and sunset is very important, as well as knowing the location of the sun on the horizon (it varies throughout the seasons). For many other photographers, knowning the location of the sun in the sky at any particular moment can be important, as it will determine the sunlight direction and shadows.

There are numerous applications available that can help photographers with this information, and I have provided a list of some of them below.
While there are many applications that will provide the sunrise and sunset times, I have restricted this list to applications that can also show the sun direction and elevation.

Website:	http://photoephemeris.com (for iPhone and iPad) http://stephentrainor.com/tools (for Desktop)
Platform:	Windows/Mac/Linux and iPhone
Cost:	for Desktop: free for iPhone and iPad: $9.49
Description:	This is map-centric sun and moon calculator, showing time and direction of sunrise and sunset, moonrise, moonset, phases of the mooon, as well as elevation above sea-level. It also allows you to see the direction of the sun and moon at any time during the day, all overlayed over Google Maps, and allows you to save multiple locations.
Images:	The Photographer's Ephemeris for Desktop

Some time ago, I asked how important are your photos to you?
Too many people do not consider the importance of backing up the photos stored on the hard drive of their computers, and have not bothered to implement any backup strategy.

This post provides some information about my backup strategy.



My backup strategy involves multiple backups, using a number of different backup mechanisms, and has evolved to suit my requirements.

Note that the strategy I'm describing suits my needs, but may not be appropriate for your backup needs.

How important are your photos to you? What would the impact be if you were to lose all the photos stored on your PC?

For professional (and serious amateur) photographers, there could be a financial impact, and for all photographers, losing all your photo memories could be devastating!



Do you backup your photos regularly? If your only copy of photos is on the hard drive of your computer, there are many ways in which they could be lost, including:

• the hard drive in your computer could crash or fail
• a virus can delete or corrupt photos
• your PC could be stolen
• someone could accidently over-write or delete the photos

You might think the chance of one of the above is so small that it will never happen to you. That is being a bit naive - people do lose important data regularly, and it could happen to you when you least expect it!