Say Hello to the TPE (The Photographer’s Ephemeris) Web v4 Preview

We’re pleased to announce a public preview of the upcoming major new release of the TPE (The Photographer’s Ephemeris) Web app, which will be version 4.

We’ve given the UI a major overhaul to meet a number of key goals. It’s far from being finished (let’s be serious – software is never ‘finished’!), so now’s your opportunity to help shape the new version by trying it out and sending us your feedback!

We’re running the preview in parallel with the current production v3 release to give everyone an opportunity to shape the new release and become familiar with the coming changes.

UI Overhaul

We’ve redesigned the layout to allow users to make better use of available screen space on height-constrained devices, such as 16:9 laptops. The timeline, previously displayed below the map, has moved to a new right-hand sidebar position. The navigation links and logo etc. are now contained in a left-hand navigation bar, which provides access to the different pages within the app, plus your account and subscription information.

The other advantage of this approach is that it allows us to accommodate a lot of new functionality!

New Map Capabilities

v4 includes multiple new map capabilities. We’ve swapped out the core mapping library for a more modern alternative that enables some sophisticated new features.

Foremost among them, a dynamic shadow map that further delivers on our promise to help you see how the light falls on the land. Previously, shadows were shown only on the 3D page. But it’s fair to say that navigating a 2D map remains a more comfortable and convenient experience for many users.

The shadows evolve dynamically as you adjust the time of day. The penumbral shadows are shown and everything is adjusted for curvature of the Earth plus the effects of refraction.

Alongside this, a number of client-side map styling options are available. Most useful, perhaps, are the greyscale and desaturated options which pull all or most of the colour out of the selected map style. This can reduce visual clutter and the number of potentially confusing colour signals, leaving you better able to focus on the changing light conditions.

Cameras and Lenses

v4 also adds the ability to add your camera body and lens collection to your account. Search our database by make and model and we’ll configure your account with the key properties of the equipment so that we can calculate things such as field of view.

If your item is not already in our database, our web search option will go find the essential facts and add it. We manually review and verify all search results, to help keep data quality high.

Believe me, adding the gear from our knowledge base is a whole lot less painful than looking up specs and typing in values yourself!

Field of View

Once you have your gear added, we can now show dynamic field of view on the map, alongside detailed FOV data in the right-hand sidebar – see the screenshot at the top of this page.

We draw the horizontal field of view accurately on the map, using the geometrically correct great circles. This matters at high latitudes and greater distances, where straight lines would be misleading:

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We have a lot more coming to the v4 release, but we’d love you to give it a go today. Post your thoughts over on the forum, and together let’s make this the best TPE release ever.