LightLog

A photography lighting tracker that tells you exactly when and how to shoot — astronomical sun/moon math plus live weather feeding AI camera-setting recommendations.

🖥 live demo🔒 private repo

Runs privately — walkthrough available on request.

The Build Loop

Because I was shooting photography where the whole outcome depends on the light — golden hour, blue hour, cloud cover, where the sun actually is, I kept hitting the fact that I was mentally juggling sunset times, twilight windows, moon phase, and weather to guess my settings, so I built LightLog that computes the celestial timing precisely, pulls live weather, and recommends ISO/aperture/shutter for the conditions. It taught me that a good tool doesn't just show data — it turns sun elevation + cloud cover into the one thing I actually need on location: what to dial in right now.

What it looks like

Dashboard — live sun elevation/azimuth, today’s light schedule (sunrise through blue hour), current weather, and moon phase.
Camera Settings Wizard — ISO, aperture, and shutter recommendations plus pro tips for the current lighting conditions.
Sessions — tracks lighting sessions over time.
Recorded walk-through of the running app.

LightLog

One-liner: A photography lighting tracker that tells you exactly when and how to shoot — astronomical sun/moon math plus live weather feeding AI camera-setting recommendations.

Origin (the Build Loop)

Because I was shooting photography where the whole outcome depends on the light — golden hour, blue hour, cloud cover, where the sun actually is, I kept hitting the fact that I was mentally juggling sunset times, twilight windows, moon phase, and weather to guess my settings, so I built LightLog that computes the celestial timing precisely, pulls live weather, and recommends ISO/aperture/shutter for the conditions. It taught me that a good tool doesn’t just show data — it turns sun elevation + cloud cover into the one thing I actually need on location: what to dial in right now.

The problem

The quality of a photo is set before you ever press the shutter, by the light. Knowing when to be somewhere — golden hour, the blue-hour window, when the sun drops below the horizon — and what the sky is doing means cross-referencing a sunset calculator, a weather app, and experience, every time. On location that’s mental overhead when you should be shooting. I wanted one screen that knew where the sun and moon were, what the weather was doing, and translated that into camera settings.

What it does

  • Real-time sun & moon tracking — precise sun elevation/azimuth via SunCalc, current moon phase and illumination, all location- and timezone-aware.
  • Photography timeline — golden hour, blue hour, and civil/nautical/astronomical twilight windows for the day, so you know exactly when to shoot.
  • AI Photography Wizard — condition-aware ISO/aperture/shutter recommendations that adapt to current lighting, weather, and celestial data, with contextual pro tips per scenario.
  • Weather integration — live temperature, humidity, cloud cover, and visibility via OpenWeather, with automated light-quality analysis (falls back to simulated data with no API key).
  • Global location search — pick any location worldwide via OpenStreetMap Nominatim geocoding, with quick switching between favorites.
  • Dynamic “Miami Vice” theming — the theme shifts with the sun’s position at the selected location; mobile-first, touch-optimized, dark-mode.

How it’s built

  • Stack: React 18 + TypeScript + Vite on the front end; Wouter routing, TailwindCSS, Radix UI primitives, TanStack Query, React Hook Form + Zod, Framer Motion. Node 20 + Express + TypeScript on the back end. SunCalc for astronomy, date-fns/date-fns-tz for timezone-correct times. In-memory storage now, with a Drizzle ORM/PostgreSQL schema already defined for a future migration.
  • Notable engineering:
    • Astronomy done correctly — sun elevation/azimuth, moon phase/illumination, and the full twilight-band timeline are computed from SunCalc against the chosen location and timezone, so the “when to shoot” windows are real, not approximate.
    • Conditions → settings translation — the AI wizard fuses celestial position with live weather into concrete camera recommendations, which is the actual value: not “here’s the data,” but “shoot at this ISO/aperture/shutter.”
    • Graceful degradation — works without an OpenWeather key by falling back to simulated weather, so the app is never dead on arrival.
  • Architecture: React client (components/hooks/lib) → Express server → external APIs (OpenWeather for weather, OSM Nominatim for geocoding), with SunCalc doing astronomy client-side; shared TypeScript schema between client and server, Drizzle schema staged for a later PostgreSQL move.

Proof points

  • Real astronomical calculation (SunCalc) for sun/moon position + full twilight-band timeline, timezone-aware for any location on earth.
  • Live weather integration (OpenWeather) with an automated light-quality assessment.
  • Global location coverage via OSM Nominatim geocoding.
  • MIT-licensed, documented (README, SETUP.md, IMPLEMENTATION.md, CONTRIBUTING.md), React 18 / Node 20 / TypeScript 5.

What to show

  • Demo: Deploy to a public URL (repo stays private). Open on a location, show today’s timeline and the AI wizard recommendation for the current conditions.
  • Visuals needed: the main dashboard with sun/moon + weather; the photography timeline (golden/blue hour, twilight bands); the AI Photography Wizard recommendation card; the dynamic theme at a couple of sun positions. TODO: capture a mobile screenshot to show the mobile-first bottom-nav layout.

Case-study angle

Alex turned a domain problem he lives — light dictates the shot — into a tool that does real astronomical math and fuses it with live weather to output the one thing a photographer needs on location: what to dial in right now.