PhotoPills might be the most popular app for planning photoshoots. However, there is another feature-rich app that can do even more. In this video, Alyn Wallace shows the app Planit Pro and some of its unique features.

If you read my article about night photography and saw the included video, you know I’m a fan of Planit Pro. It’s my favorite tool for pre-visualizing my landscape and night photos. It has a powerful VR mode and 3D terrain maps, allowing very detailed planning of the perfect camera position.

As Wallace shows in his video, those 3D terrain maps also include iconic buildings for some cities. Those models make executing challenging night photo shoots easy, even using a long lens. In his example, he shows the planning for an image of the crescent moon behind one of the large mosques in Istanbul. The result perfectly matches his plan.

Wallace continues to share additional features of Planit Pro that are not yet available in PhotoPills. It seems the team at PhotoPills is also working on a major update, which should bring its feature set closer to that of Planit.

Since both apps are not very expensive, I will continue to use both for now. I prefer PhotoPills’ AR mode in the field, while I like to use Planit for in-advance planning. It also allows me to save offline maps, which is important when I travel. Because it’s not as intuitive to use as PhotoPills, I’d encourage anybody who wants to give it a try to check the Planit documentation here.

Rarely can Katy Fielder picture her father and not see a camera in his hands. 

Across a more than 40-year career, John Fielder made a name for himself as one of Colorado’s premier nature photographers, producing roughly 200,000 photos in his ongoing attempt to capture the state’s natural beauty. 

Fielder, who died Aug. 11 at the age of 73 following a prolonged battle with pancreatic cancer, will be remembered for his love of life and his commitment to nature, friends and family. 

“I’d always imagined my dad — with what an outdoorsman he was — hiking and skiing until he was 90 years old and never having any issues with it,” said Katy, Fielder’s youngest daughter. “It’s a huge, huge loss.” 

Katy said her father passed away peacefully, while looking out at the Gore Range where he had explored endless trails and crevices, at his Summit County home with family by his side. 

‘Always pointed at nature’

From her earliest memories, Katy, 37, said she was swept up in her family’s expeditions to various pockets of Colorado. It began as a toddler harnessed to her father’s body while they glided on skis across High Country snow. As she grew older, Katy became accustomed to routine camping trips that could be weeks long. 

“I don’t think there was a day that went by without him looking out at the mountains and saying how incredibly beautiful this place is and how grateful we are to live in it,” she said. “As kids, when he would take us out into the wilderness, I think he’d show us that the world and the environment is a really big place.”

And Fielder, “never did not have his camera with him,” Katy said. “It was always pointed at nature.” 

But it wasn’t until one evening on the Eastern Plains, standing near the Pawnee Buttes, that Katy, then aged 8 or 9, stopped to think about what her father was doing. As the warm light of sunset fell over the two rocky sentinels that make up the formation, Katy stared at Fielder, who was engulfed in his work. 

“I remember I realized just how incredible and how beautiful the state was, and seeing my dad capture it, I really understood what he was doing,” Katy said. 

Fielder embraced involving his family in his work, said Katy, who remembers peeking under the cloth of her father’s large frame camera before he captured a shot. At home, Fielder would bring Katy and her siblings downstairs to the basement where they would ponder over photo transparencies on his light table. 

Fielder would even ask which ones they wanted to see in his books and calendars. For Fielder’s acclaimed pictorial history book 1870-2000, or as Katy calls it, “the big brown book,” he had the family help pick the cover.

Since beginning as a professional photographer in 1973, Fielder’s work has appeared in more than 50 books. In January 2023, he donated his Colorado photography to History Colorado and wrote in a subsequent column for the Summit Daily News: “I have never felt that I ‘owned’ my photographs, only that I was borrowing these places to visit and record, and that I would give them back someday.”

‘An inspiration to many’

Mountain guide author Jon Kedrowski, who became a close friend later in Fielder’s life, said he remembers growing up with the Colorado photographer’s work in the 1990s. 

“I had coffee table books of John’s that my parents had bought me when I was a kid,” Kedrowski said. “He was such an inspiration to many people, including myself.”

The two first met in the late 2000s during one of Fielder’s book events where they struck up a conversation about their love for outdoor exploration. Fielder told Kedrowski to reach back out and, roughly a week later, Kedrowski did. 

They formed a friendship for the remainder of Fielder’s life that included mountaineering, rafting and backpacking with llamas, one of Fielder’s favorite ways to get around, Kedrowski said. 

“At a time when I was trying to find life in my direction and my career, we could go out and leave the world behind,” Kedrowski said. 

Kedrowski said Fielder became a mentor to him, helping him navigate his own aspirations of becoming a photographer and nature writer. For Kedrowski’s first book in 2012, “Sleeping on the Summits,” Fielder wrote the foreword and later provided photos for subsequent mountain guides. 

Outside of his professional standing, Fielder helped grow Kedrowski’s outlook on life, too. 

Fielder was always “finding the joy out of struggle,” Kedrowski said. Whether it was avoiding capsizing during a 165-mile rafting trip or triggering an avalanche in the backcountry (the latter of which ended in a swift return home and a round of margaritas), Fielder lived life with a smile. 

“He always had a desire to seek more wilderness, more adventure and never look back because life is too short,” Kedrowski said. 

He remembers a time during one of their backpacking trips when this philosophy was acutely noticeable. Kedrowski said he asked Fielder what time it was to which he replied, “Time doesn’t matter here.”

Kedrowski said the message he heard was, “Don’t wait, if you’ve been putting something off that you’ve been wanting to do, don’t wait.”

‘The soul of the place’

Fielder’s life was not without tragedy. In 2005, he lost his wife Gigi to Alzheimer’s disease. In 2006, his son J.T. died by suicide. 

After both losses, Fielder became heavily involved as a volunteer in raising awareness around Alzheimer’s and suicide prevention, said Colorado author Steve Walsh, who published a children’s biography of Fielder in 2019. 

“He did a lot of work on the environment and conservation but also in the personal aspects of his life,” Walsh said. “I think it showed what a really well-rounded person he was. Family and nature were No. 1 for him, in that order.”

Fielder’s environmental and conservation work was in many ways an extension of his photography and deeply held beliefs about the natural world, Walsh said. 

When taking a photo, “Probably the most important thing was the essence of the place, the soul of the place,” Walsh said. “It wasn’t just how pretty a mountain was around him, but what it elicits.” 

Fielder has helped lead public policy on environmental efforts, such as the Great Outdoors Colorado initiative in 1992, which has since protected 2 million acres of open space, parks, trails, wildlife habitat and ranches worth $2 billion using Colorado lottery profits and other funds.

Fielder’s photos were also used to promote the passage of the 1993 Colorado Wilderness Act, which enacted a slew of environmental protections. 

His daughter, Katy, said those efforts show how Fielder’s work offered more than just scenic imagery. His photos were also a call to action. 

“Our politicians really are crucial for protecting Colorado and the beauty and land we love to use here. And if they’re not seeing it every day, it’s probably easier to lose sight of that,” Katy said. 

“The most important part of his legacy was not how much he loved Colorado,” she added, “but showing everyone else how beautiful Colorado is so that they could love it as much as him.”

The son of a Wall Street lion, he charted his own course with a camera, chronicling uptown Manhattan society and the downtown cool crowd.

Simplifying a scene can make it visually pleasing and peaceful. Minimalism in photography involves highlighting specific shapes and colors while removing unnecessary elements. It is a way to achieve elegance and orderliness in composition. And long exposures can be a powerful tool in creating a minimalist feel, especially in landscape photography.

One popular trend in landscape photography around 2010 was the use of heavy ND (neutral density) filters to block out most of the light from the camera. This technique, often using a 10-stop filter, created a different atmosphere in seascape images by turning water into a mist and emphasizing the contrast of rocks, piers, and other structures in the composition.

By using long exposures of various lengths, photographers have the freedom to sculpt the look of water in their photos. Softening the edges of waves or creating a milky, misty effect can dramatically change the mood and look of a composition, simplifying the scene in a captivating way.

To achieve long exposures, photographers use strong ND filters in front of their lenses. These filters can be screw-on or rectangular/square sheets that go into a filter holder system. It is important to note that strong ND filters may have a slight color cast, so correcting the white balance may be necessary.

To capture long exposure seascapes, a sturdy tripod is essential. Using a timer or remote shutter helps avoid camera shake. Adding weight to the tripod by filling a bag with sand or pebbles can provide extra stability. Additionally, it is important to cover the eyepiece on a DSLR and ensure that there is no light leakage when using a filter holder system.

Calculating the proper exposure with ND filters involves determining the ideal shutter speed without the filter and then adjusting accordingly. There are various apps available to assist with these calculations. Composing the scene without the filters and adding them only when ready to take the photo is recommended for better focus accuracy.

Converting images to monochrome is another technique used in minimalist photography. By removing color, the focus shifts to shape and form, creating a more abstract and simplified interpretation of the scene.

Long exposures can also simplify elements like clouds and plants, creating smoother looks or forming leading lines in the composition.

In summary, using long exposures in landscape photography can help achieve a minimalist feel by simplifying and transforming the scene. Experimenting with ND filters, composition, and monochrome conversion allows photographers to create captivating and elegant images.

Over the course of decades, Fielder’s work became a comprehensive collection of the varied environments of Colorado. He published the images in nearly 50 books and calendars.

In January, Fielder donated a selection of more than 5,000 of his photos to History Colorado. The collection was whittled down from an archive of 200,000 photos that Fielder had taken over the course of his career, and will be on a rotating display at the museum’s downtown Denver location, as well as a digital exhibition online. 

Shortly after donating his life’s work earlier this year, Fielder sat down with Colorado Matters to talk about his photography and his commitment to conservation. When he realized that his striking photos of Colorado were drawing people to the state to see the vistas for themselves, he welcomed them and hoped their exposure to the outdoors would instill a sense of respect for nature.

Ryan Warner/CPR News

“It’s one thing to look at a Fielder photograph in a book, it’s entirely another to be at that place” and experience it with all five senses, Fielder told Colorado Matters’ Ryan Warner. “And when people experience that, only then do they become advocates for protecting and preserving what’s left of wildness in America.”

In 1992, he advocated for the passage of the Great Outdoors Colorado Trust Fund Initiative that invests a part of Colorado Lottery proceeds to help fund conservation and recreation projects. And the following year, he worked with former Sen. Tim Wirth to push Congress to pass the Colorado Wilderness Act.

While Fielder’s goal at the time was to use his photography to preserve the “wildness” of Colorado, it shifted in recent years to provide a capsule of what Colorado looked like prior to a rapidly warming climate.

He hoped scientists would use his photos to “understand that planet Earth is changing faster and exponentially more than we ever thought it would change because of climate change and global warming.”

“I hope people in a decade will look at what happened from my day to their day — look at it and extrapolate and ask ‘How do we change to protect this place we love?’,” he continued.