Have you ever come across a marvellous landscape shot while on holiday or visiting some far distant place - and thought to yourself "Wouldn't thatjust look great if only the sun would set right at the end of that stretch of water, just between those mountains?" Well, it probably does - and you can probably see it from that tiny landing stage, which is the only accessible spot to that particular stretch of water - but only at one particular time and only on a few days out of the year. So how do you plan your next years holiday to arrange to be on that little landing stage on exactly the right day (weather permitting) to be able to take that masterpiece complete with setting sun?

Well, you need a couple of things - For one thing you need to know where North is and that requires a compass - and you need a 24 hour clock and a local newspaper which will tell you what time the sun will set at that particular latitude. Of course you want to be there a good half hour before the
sun actually sets and don`t forget that the most colourful part of a sunset is often half-an-hour after the sun has disappeared, but thats by the way.

To make the sunset spotter you need a card or perspex circle marked in 360 Deg. with a 24 hour clock superimposed so that the 360 Deg. and midnight are in the same place. You will find that the `hours` on the clock face are exactly 15 deg. apart and if you now add a mark at the four quarters of the circle for North, East, South & West with North being at 360 deg, East at 90 deg, South at 180 deg, and West at 270 deg then you have all the necessary information.

From a small hole in the centre of the circle you have a length of cord long enough to reach the edge of the hang-over, with a small weight attached (or you could arrange any other suitable form of indicator - if you were mechanically inclined).

Now comes the compass. If you place a small compass on your circle and when it indicates North, turn your circle so that true north, 360 deg., and 24 hours all line up. This is where your local newspaper comes in. Turn to the page that tells you the time of sunset at that particular place, and put your card upon the indicated time, if your circle is still orientated towards the north then a sight along the card from the centre will tell you where the sun will set on that particular day. If this doesn`t line up with your required masterpiece shot then move the cord so that it does line up and note what time this would indicate on your circle. It may be within the range of local sunset times for the year, which may vary according to the latitude at which you happen to be in the summer.

It may tell you that the only day upon which the sun will set in exactly the right position is when it sets at 4 p.m. - in which case you will have to get out the old snow shoes or ski`s and arrange for a winter holiday. It may be within the range of local sunset times for the year, which may vary
according to the latitude at which you will have two options, as this is about half-way in the range of sunset times and either April or September
would be suitable. Whatever you decide the indicated time will only give you a rough estimate but in most cases it will be near enough, after all you want the sun to be just a little bit up from it's actual setting moment.

Now, there is another way that you can use this sunset spotter in your photographic adventures. If you decide upon making a perspex one you canalso use it in reverse - so to speak, by placing it on a map. I will give you an example - A couple of years ago we visited the north of Scotland and went to Dounray. We wanted to get a really dramatic shot of the Dounray buildings silhouetted against an enormous setting sun, and taken 1 1/2 miles away from our 1000mm F8, home made lens which weighs about 56 Lbs. There is a road or track about the right distance away and with a good view of the buildings but it is about a mile long and where would we have to set up our massive equipment to get the sun in the right place before it disappeared into the sea? Well we didn't have a sunset spotter at that time so we parked the car and unloaded the equipment and then started a mad dash along the road while the sun advanced upon it`s target at a tremendous pace, seeming to slide along horizontally, every time we thought we had the right place it went on a bit further. The sunset spotter and the local time of sunset would have given us a much closer estimate of the correct position from which to get our photograph. In the event we were so exhausted that we only managed to get a black & white negative on another camera which didn`t require much lifting.

If you place your 'spotter' upon a map of the area you wish to photograph, with the cord lined up to the time of sunset and the 360 deg. towards thenorth and then move it along until the foreground building or mountain, or tree on the map, that you wish to appear in your photograph, lies on theline of the cord, then by looking back along the cord and finding a road or open space along that line, you should be able to see the sun setting
behind that building or tree from that point.

 

From my experience of sunsets in general the sun should would either disappear into a large black cloud just as you got your equipment all set up -and then re-appear under the cloud just as you got it all packed away again - or you would find that since the map was produced, someone had
built a motorway in between you and your target.

The only part of the use of this sunset spotter that we haven`t worked out yet is how you could develope a scale to tell you upon which dates
during the year the sun will set at a particular spot. If you know (from the newspaper) the time of the sunset while you are there - you can estimatethat in ten days time it will have moved on 20 minutes one way or the other depending upon whether you are there before midsummers day or after. We are not well enough versed in the movements of the sun at various times of the year to be able to work this out yet, but I know it is not a linear movement: in other words it moves faster at some time of the year than it does at others. We are at present trying to work out a formula
which would tell us the dates at various latitudes upon which the sun would set at a given time.

If anyone has any ideas upon which books or navigation tables might be of help, we would be most grateful to hear about it.

Major used a 'sun' compass to navigate his gun tractor across the Western Desert in the North African campaigne during the war, but in spite of
all our efforts in visiting various Army Surplus stores we have never been able to find one. We have produced a negative which will print the
necessary circle giving degrees and the 24 hour clock, if anyone would like either a lith film (clear) or paper (opaque) circle, we will be pleased to
send you one.