We just returned from a long trip to Death Valley National Park, one of my favorite places for photography and exploration. This trip reminded me how much I depend on a single app for my nature and landscape photography: Gaia GPS, which I use on my iPhone 7 Plus. Because Death Valley has so few trails and allows cross-country travel, the park is a great place for exploration and we used our Gaia GPS app for almost every photography outing in the park.

As an example, the Gaia GPS app helped make the photo at the top of this post possible. Since Ron and I have a bit of an obsession with mud and sand patterns, we spent some time on this trip exploring to see if we could find some new areas for this kind of photography. This exploration involved looking at satellite images of Death Valley National Park on Google to identify some potential spots and then heading out cross-country to see what we might find.

For this kind of outing, the Gaia app is helpful for recording a track, marking waypoints, and saving photos of promising spots. When heading out cross country for sunset, we could mark the location of our car to help in getting back after dark. For sunrise, having a point marked in advance - with a high-quality photo for reference - is helpful for returning to a very specific spot in a mostly featureless landscape. While I could do these same things with a handheld GPS, the Gaia app is so much easier to us, and saving photos as waypoints with detailed titles and notes has become an essential tool for my photography.