Ten how-to guides on getting photographs out of Lightpath — from reading the Shot Score to planning a Milky Way shoot. Every guide ends with its sources.
The Shot Score is the first thing Lightpath shows you and the fastest way to decide whether to grab the camera. It is one number from 0 to 100, but it is built from four separate ingredients, and the number is only useful if you know which ingredient is dragging it down.
Photographers talk about "golden hour" as if it were a fixed 60 minutes. It is not. Its length depends on your latitude and the season: near the equator it can be twenty minutes; in Iceland in June it can last most of the night. Lightpath's Light timeline exists so you never have to guess.
The most memorable landscape photographs are often alignments: the sun setting exactly in the notch of a canyon, the full moon rising behind a lighthouse, the last light threading a city street. These are not luck. They are geometry, and the Planner is built to do the geometry for you.
The map tells you *where* the sun will be. It cannot tell you whether a tree, a ridge or an apartment block is in the way, or whether your lens can hold the whole scene. Two tools close that gap: AR sky view and the Field of view calculator.
The bright, textured band of the Milky Way that fills astrophotographs is the galactic core, in the direction of Sagittarius. It is only above the horizon at night for part of the year, it needs a dark sky, and it moves — so a good core photograph is a scheduling problem before it is a camera problem. Lightpath handles the schedule; this guide covers the camera.
The moon is the one celestial object that can be either the subject or the problem. A rising full moon is a photograph. A full moon overhead at 2 a.m. is why your Milky Way frame looks like dusk. Lightpath tracks its phase, altitude and azimuth so you can decide which one you are dealing with.
Weather apps are built to answer "will I get wet?" Photographers need a different question: "what will the light do?" The two things that matter most are cloud cover and how clean the air is, and Lightpath pulls both into the Shot Score. This guide explains how to read them.
Cameras meter well and choose settings badly. Auto mode will hand you f/8 at 1/125 and ISO 100 for a bright scene, which is technically correct and creatively useless if you wanted f/2.8 for a soft background or a two-second exposure to smooth a waterfall. The Exposure tool exists so you can take the camera's *measurement* and throw away its *decision*.
A landscape with a boulder at your feet and a peak on the horizon has to be sharp from front to back, and the only way to know whether it will be is to calculate it. The Depth of field tool does the calculation. This guide explains what the numbers mean and how to use them in the field.
A time-lapse is a video assembled from still photographs taken at a fixed interval. Sunsets, cloud movement over a ridge and the Milky Way wheeling overhead all suit it, and all of them fail for the same reason: the shoot ends before the sequence is long enough, or the interval was wrong for the subject. The Time-lapse tool turns "I want a 20-second clip of this sunset" into "shoot every 5 seconds for 40 minutes".