What are the three most important aspects of having a successful business? Location. Location. Location. That’s what people say, right? But how important is location in fine art photography? Very! You want specific reasons? That’s for some other time. For now, just take my word for it. If you are half ass-ing your choice of location for your fine art shots, you’re photo pants are going to be really baggy on one side. (Get it? Half an ass in your pants. Never mind.)

So, for the sake of not arguing, let’s all agree that unlike a gerbil ranch, a McDonalds, or a crack dealer, with a fine art photograph if location isn’t always the most important element you may want to make sure it’s in the top 5.

What? Now you have to actually put work into where you’re going to shoot, too? Yeah. But wipe that sour apple look off your face. Scouting a location nowadays can be easier than ever thanks to a little company you’ve probably never heard of called “Google.” They have a map service that includes satellite views for pretty much the whole world. So at the very least you can get a rough idea of the landscape. But what if you want more detail?

In the old days (like 3 years ago) you would have had to get your butt out of bed and drive all over town. Now, if they have coverage of your desired area, you can use Google street view to do all your work for you.

For my photo The Letter I had a pretty specific image in my head. I wanted a mail box on the sidewalk in front of a chain link fence. I didn’t want to have any houses or large buildings blocking out the sky, either. Man, I’m a picky SOB. So what did I do? First I checked with Google to see if there were any sites that listed mailboxes by zip code. There is one! http://www.payphone-project.com/mailboxes/

I entered the zip code where I live because I’m lazy and didn’t want to drive all over town unless I had to. It listed the address of all the mailboxes nearby along with the cross street. Then I went over to maps.google.com and started entering in the mailbox locations. Looking at the street view it was clear none of these were going to work. Until I found this one:

Of course the mailbox is gone now. So you’ll have to imagine the same image, but with a mailbox showing and me sitting at my computer wearing nothing but a ski mask, eating pink cotton candy, and squealing with delight. I hopped in my car and drove right over to check it out. You see, if you find the perfect spot in Google street view, you probably want to go there in person and make sure it still looks the same as when they last updated their image rather than having your model and crew showing up to that perfect Victorian mansion you wanted for your shot and it turning out there’s actually a grand opening for the some new gerbil ranch.

So the next time you think you don’t have time to make time to find the right location, it’s time to think twice and your friends over at Google for a little help. Okay, you can stop imagining me eating cotton candy now.

Nice!

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