No matter if you shoot inside or outside, when daylight is your main light source, it's mandatory to know where the sun will be at a certain time of the day. Not only because you want to have the sun at a specific place, either facing you or going in your direction, but also because it defines the shape of shadows.
Most of the time, I work with sunlight only. I hardly use reflectors. But I like to know what to shoot where, before I travel places. I was shooting inside an apartment once, but it was facing North. What a disappointment, hardly any light came through and I had to switch on all lamps inside which gave a much different look than I had wanted.
And just now, I come back from a trip to Tenerife. As always, I was planning my shoots ahead in detail. It's quite necessary to do so, to fit as many photos in a certain amount of time. And while we currently have only 7 hours of daytime here in Germany, in Tenerife days were still filled with a full 10 hours of sunshine. I was looking for a beach where I could shoot with the morning sun coming out of the water at the horizon.
It's cool that you can do this, these days. Remote location scouting with a handy website that works with a Google map and tells you the time of sunrise and sunset for any place in this world: SunCalc.
You can zoom in closer to find good spots and then switch to the Satellite view in the top left corner. As the buttons are placed a bit stupid overlaying the Google buttons, you can use the +/- keys on your keyboard to zoom in or out. One of those little helpers that I use for all my photo projects.
