locations

Since time immemorial, the majority of street photographers among us chase a singular objective when they walk out with their cameras: chaos. There are, of course, exceptions to this generalization. But the most happening places mostly always give us the maximum to work with.

Those who want to photograph the night sky can leverage techniques common to all of landscape photography, but they still need to know when, and where, the objects they want to capture in the night sky are going to happen. To help out with that, Telescope Guide has released its 2021-2022 Astronomy Guide and Events Calendar including the best things to see in the night sky.

One of the most hotly debated questions for landscape photographers is how to answer the age-old question, “Where did you shoot that?” While the question is simple enough, whether to answer (and how to answer) is an internal question many shooters contend with in the age of Instagram.

Filmmaker and journalist Johnny Harris made this inspiring 7-minute video about the picturesque Austrian town of Hallstatt, which sits nestled between a lake and a mountain in the Alps. Harris looks at the idea of photography clichés and breaking out of them to find unique photos and experiences.

Don't have the time or money to travel to picturesque portrait locations? There's like spots for nice portraits in your own backyard. Photographers Tajreen Hedayet and Chloe V. of Tajreen&Co made this short, sweet, and informative 2-minute video on 4 portrait locations you can find in any neighborhood.

Sometimes the strangest or most mundane locations can make for compelling portrait environments. Mango Street made this short and sweet video in which it presents 9 portrait location suggestions in just 90 seconds.

Japan goes into a frenzy each spring as millions of locals and tourists gather to catch a glimpse of the elusive cherry blossom. Simply known as sakura, the petals come and go like the wind, representing the ethereal beauty of life.

Sherpa is a free iOS app that turns top geotagged Instagram photos in to a travel guide and location scouting tool.

Family homes provide a multitude of possible backgrounds and framing opportunities for wonderful photographs. But it’s easy to end up with cluttered-looking shots if you get the background wrong. Choosing your location carefully can make all the difference.

Hang around a group of landscape photographers long enough, and you'll undoubtedly hear them talking about location scouting.

Want to know the most popular photo spot among Instagrammers in each state in the US? The travel Busbud recently decided to do some serious digging to find out. The map above shows the findings. The markers show where the most popular spot is found, and the state is color coded by location type.

Want to find the sweetest photo locations near where you are? There's a new app that can point you in the right direction. It's called ShutterSpots, and it's an interactive community database of popular places to capture great photos.

Every year Instagram goes through their data and compiles a list of the ten most Instagrammed locations of the year. And while they haven't published the list themselves yet, they were kind enough to send it over to us.

So, without further ado, join us as we count down the top 10 geotagged locations of 2014 on Instagram.

A decade ago, photographer Andrew Filer obtained the most detailed map of North Dakota he could find, and began a project of documenting the towns on it. Not just some of the towns, but every single named dot on the map. After years of dedicated work, Filer succeeded in photographing the entire state. He ended up visiting over 850 different locations and snapping 9,308 photographs.

What if there were an up-to-date live stream of photos from any location on Earth, allowing you to see whatever is happening "right now"? Well, there is: Worldcam is a simple web app that's designed to do just that. Simple provide it with two pieces of information: city and location. City is pretty straightforward, but location is the cool one; you can type things like businesses, buildings, parks, and more.

Photographer Stefan Koppelkamm first photographed East Germany in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before the reunification. He revisited the same locations a decade later, and rephotographed them from exactly the same viewpoints to document the drastic social and economic transformations that came about during the time between the photos.

Japanese photographer Mariko Sakaguchi has a curious self-portrait series in which she photographs herself sitting in a bathtub in all kinds of random locations, which range from business offices to lecture halls.

Upon first glance, photographer Frank Kunert's photographs may look like they show pretty ordinary places. Look a little closer, however, and you'll start to notice that each one has something wrong about it, and that none of the scenes would actually exist in the real world. They're actually miniature scenes that are meticulously built by hand!

German photographer Berthold Steinhilber has an awesome technique for lighting expansive locations at night: he tediously paints in the light manually with a powerful 1.8-pound headlamp powered by a 12-volt car battery. Depending on the scale of the location, his large format film exposures last anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours, with the aperture set between f/8 and f/16. The above photo took 1.5 hours at f/16.

Last year map geek Eric Fischer created heat maps showing where Flickr photos are taken in large cities and comparing tourist vs. local hotspots. Now he's back again with beautiful maps showing geotagged Flickr photos and Twitter Tweets, and the maps aren't limited to cities -- there's maps for continents (see North America above) and even the whole world! The orange dots show photos, the blue ones indicate Tweets, and a white one means both were found in that location.