Since some months now I am shooting outdoors, and I like it !! But when you are shooting for stock the location should fit into your plan, it should add value. So I decided it is time to start with location scouting. One important part of location scouting is of course to go seeing the location. For that purpose I bought myself a smartphone with a nice camera and good navigation software.
Location scouting starts with desk study
First step has been to buy some travel books for Holland, Belgium and France. Most general travel books give you very little useful information. It is in the books targeted on walkers and nature lovers you will find the sort of info you can really use for preparing shoots.
Second resource of course is the web. Stock agencies (Getty !!) and sites like Panoramio and Flickr give you quite good visual information on the regions you are investigating. But this is especially true for very popular touristic regions. You will find tons of photos for the Provence but very little for the Picardie region. What makes Panoramio and Flickr especial useful is the use of Google Maps, pics are geo-tagged and plotted on the Google Map, very practical !!
And then you will need to see the location, don’t you ?
Third step in scouting outdoors locations is having a look yourself and create your own “database”. For this purpose a smartphone with navigation software and a good camera is very useful. I bought myself a Nokia N79 with 5MP camera and have McGuider software installed. After the usual &*%@3$44 and some hours later everything worked and I entered my first destination in my N79: Kampina in the Netherlands. McGuider brought me without problems to the parking lot right near the entrance of this area. And I had a short walk and shot some images with the N79.
Kampina, The Netherlands
Uploading pics to Flickr and use Google Maps
I decided to store these kind of pics in Flickr. So I have created my first photo set “Kampina” in Flickr. If you go to Flickr you will see that you can click on “map” and see all your pics nicely plotted on the Google Maps. And you can look for photos of other Flickr users plotted in this same area. Whenever I upload my location pics to Flickr they also become available for art directors, models, etc. And you have some nice communication tool available !!
After this first step I will read again the Wikipedia article on location scouting, I think it is quite good.
Maybe Panoramio is even better for my purposes ? I chose for Flickr because of its popularity. Any thoughts ???
