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Finding a suitable shooting location is very time consuming, costs gas money, and is constantly changing (because of season, construction, whatever). It is a necessary evil in the business, and something we all to eager to farm out to someone else. Fortunately there is a new tool available as a solution to these issues.  ShotHotSpot not only has a simple premise, to find cool (hot) spots to shoot, but it’s potential is really unlimited. It has already proved invaluable to me on my recent jaunt to Nashville, Tennessee for an editorial shoot.

ShotHotSpot uses other apps like Flickr and Panoramio’s geotagging features to figure out where good shooting spots are. How this is accomplished is anyone’s guess, but we are sure it is some complicated algorithm that only superhuman geniuses can understand. To search a location is pretty easy: you simply type in where you are going.

There is an advanced search to help you get more refined results once you get the hang of how it classifies hot spots.

Categories of hotspots include People, Landscapes, Panoramic, Architecture, and many others. These categories allow you to filter the results to what you are looking to shoot. For example: Yosemite has TONS of “landscape” hotspots, but very little “Architecture” hotspots.

This was pretty sweet. A convenient map with waypoints that linked to more in depth descriptions of the locations including images provided by users. The Quick Key to the right offers a general name for each spot just in case something sounds cool so you can just click on it and head straight there. The detailed results are really straight forward, showing keywords for the location and a variety of images.

Now, for all that is awesome about this website, there are some noticeable drawbacks. One is that it’s pretty contingent on users geotagging their images, and or taking the time to make an account and do it by hand. The second drawback is that the results aren’t always that accurate. We have heard stories of the local taco joint being tagged a “Panoramic” hotspot. Of course with more users this should get better as we are sure ShotHotSpot’s results algorithm is based somewhat on the number of times a place pops up and what it’s tagged with. All in all, this is a great idea that can be an invaluable location scouting resource particularly for those of us not able to hire the professionals for every shoot.

Source Fstoppers

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