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Helios V2.1

And now for a review for an app that’s so esoteric you’ll think you’ll probably never buy it, not only for it’s obscure usefulness, but more because of it’s AU $36 price.

Well after your initial revulsion at the buy price maybe you do want this beguiling app and just haven’t figured out a why...

I bought it and here’s the why....

The sun comes up and the sun goes down. Im a cinematographer. The origins of the word mean literally “writing with light. “

Clearly, light is my main tool of choice in image making and the biggest light source around is the sun. When shooting outdoors be it stills or motion, you’re usually in a constant battle with the sun to try and get thing looking the way you want. When will it rise, where will it be in the sky and when will it clear tall obstructions like mountains or even buildings ?

The reason it’s a battle, is because the damn thing is always moving ! At different times of the day it’s in a different part of the sky.

But it’s not just Cinematographers that are interested in the position of the sun. Think of gardeners, builders, town planners and home renovators. They would all need to know where and how the sun falls. There’s also one of the fastest growing add-on’s to a home in Australia....sonar panel installation.

And that’s where Helios comes into play. It plots and predicts the sun’s path through the day for a given location. It also tells you the sunrise and set too, (although that’s readily available from other sources). For cinematographer's, it’s designed to be used for doing location rece’s and want to accurately predict the sun’s behaviour in that location, days or weeks or even years in advance.

It will also tell you the exact bearing on the horizon for where the sun will rise and set for a given day. Very useful if you want to set up a lock-off shot of sunrise where you want the sun to appear from below the horizon into frame. How else would you know where exactly to point the camera with a very long lens so that you capture the very first beams of light as they flare down your lens ?


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By default it opens in what they call Heliometer view and shows you the sun’s highest position in the sky and the time it will be at that position. You can drag the sun with your finger though the hours of the day and the Heliometer will tell you where on the compass the suns direction will be coming from. It also dynamically updates the shadow length ratio, which you can use to predict the length and movement of shadows cast by the sun.

The little orange wedges either side of sunset and sunrise indicate when magic hour is, that magical time that us photographer's love, which is that small window of time just before sunrise and just after sunrise, when there’s enough light to take a photo, but the sun is actually below the horizon. The funny thing is, that depending on where you are on the planet, magic hour is rarely an hour long. Now you can get a prediction of exactly how long it is.


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Tapping on the Skyview to the far right plots another version of the suns path. If you imagine lying on your back and staring straight up into the air the centre is right above you and the outer circle represents the horizon. This shows the sun height or elevation as it moves through the day and again you can dynamically drag the sun along the timeline at the bottom to check it’s position at different times of the day.


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It all really comes together when you tap the compass on the bottom left to activate the iPhone internal compass. In both Helioview and Skyview, the indicators will now “float” as you pan the iPhone around. Super cool.


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Actually though, for my money the best feature of this app is its integration with the iPhone inclinometer to very accurately predict when the sun will be at a certain elevation in the sky. Imagine you want to organise a fashion shoot down one of Melbourne's famous little alleys. Now you can visit the location and using the clinometer function, find out exactly when the lane will have sunlight, for how long and how high the sun will be in the sky at that time.

You might also want a shot of a tall building with the sun just starting to peek around from behind it, with a lovely glint of the windows. Once again, you can predict exactly when (or even if) this is going to happen on a given day from a given location.

You may even be shooting somewhere like the snowy mountains and want to know exactly when the sun would break from behind a mountain and light up your valley location.


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After activating the inclinometer, you simply sight along the iphone from the location you’re wanting to test for, tap the screen to lock it in and you’ll get a very accurate time prediction for when the sun (if at all) will shine through said window.

You can also use the inclinometer to predict the fall of shadows and even their length on the ground, assuming you know the object’s height.

Any of these predictions can be calculated for days weeks or even years in advance if you want, by just tapping through the date function. You don’t have to even use your GPS location, you can easily recall one of the the 30 000 pre-set locations around the world, or just enter a lat and long. You can also create a set of favourite locations and store them.

If you want to appear really geeky Helios can produce a table of raw data for a given location so you can work out for yourself. Um..but I’d rather just use Helios thanks !


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It’s accurate too, apparently more so than many other similar apps as Helios takes into account “Precession”, which is a slight wobbling of the earth’s rotation cycle that takes place over every 26000 years as well as “Nutation”, another wobble introduced every 18.6 years by the moon. If only the iPhone battery was good for that long.

It’s clearly been specifically designed for cinematographers, but anyone who wanted to predict the suns movements would find it useful. Stills photographers seem obvious and will also find is as useful as their motion picture brethren.

I imagine anyone renovating or building a home may want to know exactly when the sun will shine through their new doors or windows at certain times of the years as well. Gardeners too would love to be able to predict when shadow’s would fall on a certain area from other objects like fences, trees etc. And something I feel we all will be doing at some point soon, trying to work out where the best place to site your new solar array ! Maybe $36 is cheap for that kind of knowledge.

The interface is beautifully elegant and at first incomprehensible, but that’s only cause I wasn’t smart enough to read the manual first to work out what everything meant. Helios does a great job of doing what it sets out to do, enabling the user to accurately predict and visualise the sun’s movements and it’s light and shadow affect on a given location. The graphic layout is pleasing and the interface makes sense once you know what everything does.


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Built into this app is a comprehensive manual which is aimed at dopes like me who don’t know their azimuth from their longitude. Well actually it’s not built in, but a web linked HTML manual, but you don’t have to leave the app to use it. It’s well written and has a fantastic light sense of humour about it, something rarely achieved in instruction manuals. You do of course need a data connection to access it.

For extra fun, it’s worth checking out their saucy lounge-themed demo video as well and you’ll get a great sense of how the interface works.

The price ? Well $36 might seem rich, but the nearest equivalent in handhelds for cinematographers and photographers is the wheeler sunpredictor software which is only available for windows mobile devices and is US $145. I feel a bit unpatriotic because this software is used by a lot of cinematographers and was designed by fellow Australian cinematographer John Weeler

I figure my “get out of jail” on this is that it’s not available for iPhone and it doesn’t have an inclinometer function built into it, one of the best features of this app.

It’s funny that we think of iphone apps as being expensive once you go past $10 and yet we’d happily pay a lot more for applications for desktops that do the same thing. Maybe it’s because people still think of the iPhone as just a phone.

If you were doing it old school, you’d be printing out tables from the admittedly free sources and then using a $100 Suunto inclinometer and compass on location to work out the shadow info. Now you can do it all in one device.

It seems like a bit of a bargain to me compared to the work and gear you’d have to carry otherwise and you can take on a near Mayan soothsaying status amongst your friends when you pronounce with certainty where the sun will be travelling throughout the day.

One extra feature I should note here to is that it will also produce an emailable summation of the sun’s activity for sending onto others in your production office. Daily call sheet’s for example usually list the sunrise and sun set time.


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The software was designed by a couple of poms living in LA at Chemical Wedding. There’s some additional info and screen shots on their site along with the aforementioned saucy demo video. ( It’s worth a look for this reason alone). Stay tuned because they have a number of great film and production related apps still to come.

All in all, I found it a delight to use and especially loved the inclinometer function. Helios delivers an accurate and useful tool for any cinematographer or serious photographer and would also be of great use to any gardener, architect, town planner or builder / home renovator. This unit is still cheaper than any comparable mobile application and is the only one that actually uses a built in inclinometer. If you’re serious about cinematography and own an iPhone then it’s a must have.

So an unabashed 5 / 5 for me.

That is frigging awesome !
I draw house plans and for any renovation that extends the roof line you have to submit a shadow diagram with the DA.
This would be very handy.
All I gotta do now is buy me an iPhone !

Stewie

Originally Posted by mitty

I heard you talking about this on the Mactalk interview with Anthony (which I thoroughly enjoyed by the way) and this app sounds simply awesome. Sadly I personally really have no use for it at all but I'd love to have a play with it!

Re the costs of iphone software... my personal opinion is that iphone software pricing is simply psychological, people think it has to be a small price because the iphone is a small device. But if it can do stuff like this, and fills a need so well, then I think the $36 price tag is a bargain.

I think you're right...

A friend of mine has had an iphone 3g almost since launch and has refused to ever purchase an app. I showed him through all of mine and his jaw dropped. It's like he'd just forgotten that you could install cool applications...

After a day he'd started spending.....

Thanks for the kind words too..

jb