Planning Sun Position at a Photo Spot: Light Instead of Luck

Updated: August 2026 – Two hours’ drive, perfect clouds, and then the sun sits exactly behind the train. If you can plan sun position at a photo spot, you save yourself days like that. This guide explains the maths behind azimuth and elevation, translates it into rules of thumb for railway lines, and shows why the same location works at completely different times of day in winter than in summer.

Planning sun position: the short answer

You plan the sun position for a photo spot by comparing the direction of the line with the sun’s azimuth at the planned time. If the sun is behind your position and hits the side of the train at an angle, you get directional front light. If it’s behind the train, you’re shooting into the light. Everything else – time of day, season, choice of location – is just optimising that one relationship.

For that you need two numbers. Azimuth describes the sun’s compass direction, measured clockwise from north: 90 degrees is east, 180 degrees south, 270 degrees west. Elevation describes how high the sun stands above the horizon. Azimuth decides which side of the train gets light; elevation decides how hard and how long the shadows are.

Why 12 o’clock isn’t noon

The most common planning mistake: assuming the sun is in the south at midday. In fact the high point shifts for three reasons.

• Longitude: Central European Time is based on a reference meridian in the east of the time zone area. The further west you stand, the later the sun reaches its high point – roughly four minutes per degree of longitude. Between the west and east of Germany that adds up to a good half hour.
• Equation of time: because the Earth’s orbit is an ellipse and its axis is tilted, the “sun clock” runs up to a good quarter of an hour ahead of or behind civil time over the course of the year.
• Daylight saving time: during daylight saving time a further full hour is added.

In total, the sun’s high point in Germany during daylight saving time typically falls well after 1pm. If you plan your time window by the clock instead of the sun’s position, you’ll regularly be out by an hour to an hour and a half – enough to ruin a shot. Work this out once for your regular spots and note it in your own spot collection on the trainspotter map, and you never have to calculate it again.

The season turns your spot around

The point where the sun rises shifts considerably over the year. Roughly speaking, for Germany:

Period	Sunrise approx.	Sunset approx.	Rough noon height	What that means for railway photos
Summer solstice	North-east, around 45–55°	North-west, around 305–315°	60–66°	very early and very late light, harsh and steep at midday
Early/late summer	East-north-east	West-north-west	approx. 50–60°	long usable off-peak times, usually too steep at midday
Equinox	almost due east	almost due west	35–43°	ideal for east-west lines, balanced light
Late autumn/early spring	East-south-east	West-south-west	approx. 20–30°	flat, well-modelling light all day
Winter solstice	South-east, around 125–135°	South-west, around 225–235°	11–19°	short day, but usable light throughout

These are rough bands for German latitudes, not table values for a specific location. For the exact time at a particular spot, ask a sun position tool – but the rough bands help you decide whether the research is worthwhile in the first place.

The practical consequence is bigger than it sounds: a north-south line gets light on the long sides in the morning and evening in summer, and from above at midday. In the Middle Rhine Valley near Boppard, that’s exactly what decides which side of the Rhine you should stand on that day. An east-west line works almost perfectly around the equinoxes in the morning and evening, but hardly at all at the off-peak times in high summer, because the sun then rises and sets far to the north. If you keep that in mind, you choose spots deliberately for the season – a principle that also runs throughout the guide to railway photography with location scouting.

Working out sun height yourself

The sun’s height at noon follows a simple formula: 90 degrees minus latitude plus solar declination. Declination swings over the year between roughly plus and minus 23.4 degrees – positive in the northern summer, zero at the equinoxes, negative in the northern winter. That lets you estimate, for any place and season, how steep the light is at midday.

From route direction to time window

The sun’s position alone doesn’t say anything on its own. It’s only combined with the track alignment that a statement emerges. The process is always the same.

The last point is what separates theory from practice. Mathematically, the sun sets at the geometric horizon – in reality it often disappears behind hills, trees and buildings much earlier. In the narrow, wooded Fils valley at the Geislinger Steige, that costs more than an hour of usable light at some standpoints. In Alpine valleys the effect is even more extreme: at the Bahnmuseum Albula in Bergün, the Albula line runs right past the building, but in the basin the sun only stands over the surrounding slopes for part of the day. So note down at every visit when the light actually disappeared at the spot. These experience-based values are worth more than any calculation, and complement the technical questions covered in the guide how to take good photos of trains.

When the light won’t cooperate

Not every spot can be turned into front light. At Cologne Hauptbahnhof, for example, the east side towards the bridge works in the morning and the west side towards Hansaring works in the late afternoon – in between, only changing location helps. There are then three ways out, and all three are legitimate.

Especially with steam locomotives, backlight is no makeshift, but often the better choice, because it’s what gives the smoke plume its structure – as the guide photographing steam trains shows. You can plan for this via fixed running days, for example at the Bavarian Railway Museum in Nördlingen. And once the light is completely gone, a topic of its own begins: the right camera settings for trainspotting at night turn blue hour into a subject rather than a problem.

What you should watch out for

• Don’t plan by the clock, plan by the azimuth. The clock time is a time-zone convention; the sun doesn’t care.
• Factor in the local horizon. Calculated sunrise and sunset times apply to a clear horizon, which barely exists at any spot.
• Don’t forget the direction of travel. A spot can be perfect for trains going one way and useless for the other direction. On light railways like the APPEVA in the Somme valley, which climbs a ramp from the valley up to the plateau, the lit side even changes several times on the same run.
• Clouds aren’t a write-off. Light cloud cover acts like a giant diffuser and saves spots that don’t work in harsh midday light.
• Think about reflections. Bright vehicle flanks in low sun easily blow out. A stop less exposure is often the safer choice.
• Plan focal length and standing distance too. How strongly the light angle reads also depends on how obliquely you stand to the train – see the rundown of which focal length is best for railway photography.

Your own light catalogue

The biggest efficiency gain doesn’t come from a better tool, but from documentation. If you note three lines after every visit – date, time, when the light arrived and when it left – you’ll have a personal light catalogue after one season. It beats any general rule, because it contains the trees, buildings and sightlines of your specific location.

Combine that with your sighting history: once you know which services run when at a spot and when the light suits it there, two separate pieces of information become one plannable time window. The guide to train photos and railway photography shows how to keep both properly recorded, and for choosing locations at major hubs the overview of the best stations for trainspotting helps.

Conclusion

Light planning isn’t an art, it’s geometry with two angles. If you know which way your line runs, where the sun is at the time in question and how high it stands, you know the outcome before you set off. The rest is experience with the specific place: where the tree line blocks the evening sun, where the noise barrier casts a shadow onto the track. No tool delivers those details – they emerge once you write them down.