BYgo is a free light planning tool for photographers. Enter any city and it tells you whether conditions are worth shooting, when golden hour is, what the shadows will be like, which film to load, and what camera settings to start with.

Yes. BYgo is completely free to use and requires no account or registration.

How is BYgo different from PhotoPills?

PhotoPills shows you data. BYgo makes a decision. It analyses conditions and tells you directly whether to go out and shoot, rather than leaving you to interpret numbers yourself.

Does BYgo work for analog film photography?

Yes. BYgo recommends specific film stocks matched to actual shooting conditions, with push and pull development notes where relevant.

BYgo — Before You Go

Before You Go: Light planning for photographers

Go out
better prepared
than yesterday.

There is a particular sort of misery in arriving somewhere with a camera and discovering the light is wrong. Most tools will tell you the sun rises at 07:04. None of them will tell you whether that is worth your trouble. BYgo will.

Try BYgo See how it works

Data points per city

∞

Cities supported

Days of forecast

Golden hour timing Shadow quality Analog film recommendations Camera settings Shooting brief Photographer references 7-day forecast Best months grid Blue hour windows Golden hour timing Shadow quality Analog film recommendations Camera settings Shooting brief Photographer references 7-day forecast Best months grid Blue hour windows

What BYgo does

It does not show you data. It tells you what to do.

Most light planning tools are dashboards in disguise. They hand you numbers and leave the thinking to you. Sunrise at 07:04. Cloud cover 68%. UV index 3. Perfectly accurate. Completely useless.

BYgo reads the conditions and produces a shooting brief. Not a chart. Not a forecast. A decision with the specific windows worth your time, what to look for in each one, and which photographers built careers working in exactly this light.

Every city. Every condition. Every time of day. The brief changes when the conditions change. It is never the same twice.

See your brief now →

Example brief — overcast, late afternoon

All day

Street portraits

The sky has turned itself into a softbox and it belongs to you. Light arrives from everywhere at once, wraps around faces, finds no shadow worth hiding in. Point the camera at a person. Any person. Any time of day.

The kind of day Chris Killip spent his career waiting for in northeast England. He never complained about the weather. He understood it was the whole point. See the work →

17:42 golden hour

Lit windows at dusk

The moment when interior lights become visible against the outside sky. Windows glow. People move behind glass. The city goes dark around them and the windows are the only thing that matters.

Tod Hido drove residential streets at dusk for years looking for exactly this. A lit window in a dark street is one of the most reliable emotional triggers in photography. House Hunting →

+ film recommendations · camera settings · shadow quality · best months

📋

Shooting brief

Conditions translated into scenarios. What to shoot, when, and which photographers worked in exactly this light.

☀

Light windows

Precise windows for golden hour, blue hour, and solar noon. It does not approximate. Approximating is for amateurs.

🌑

Shadow quality

Hard shadows or soft. A timeline showing how this changes as the day gets on. Shadows have a character.

🎞

Film stock picks

B&W, colour negative, slide film. Matched to what the sky is actually doing, with push notes where relevant.

📷

Camera settings

Starting points by lens type. These are suggestions. Your camera and your eye will almost certainly have objections.

📅

7-day forecast

A quality rating for each of the next seven days. Allows planning. Eliminates hoping, which is an unreliable strategy.

Who it's for

For photographers who go out on purpose.

Documentary photographers

You work in real places under real conditions with no studio to retreat to. BYgo tells you what those conditions are before you find out the hard way.

Street photographers

The light on a street can be remarkable or it can be nothing at all. Knowing which, before lacing your shoes, is the sort of information BYgo considers its business.

Analog film shooters

Film costs money and does not last forever. Loading the wrong stock is a waste of both. BYgo recommends the right one. You are of course free to ignore it.

Early users

What photographers are saying.

"I checked BYgo before heading out on a grey Tuesday morning. It told me the overcast was the point, not the problem, and referenced Killip. I went out. It was one of my best sessions."

Agnes Burger / Street photographer, 11K followers

"I was about to cancel a shoot because of cloud cover. The brief told me to go anyway and explained exactly what to look for. I came back with the best frames I have made this year."

Beta user / Documentary photographer

"The film recommendation matched the conditions precisely. I loaded Portra 400 instead of what I had planned and the results made sense in a way they usually do not on overcast days."

Beta user / Analog photographer