The Golden Hour

My second favourite time of day is the Golden Hour. Have you ever wondered what makes people stop in their tracks when they see an image and just say “Wow”!  99 percent of the time, it is all about the Light.. Light can transform everyday objects and backdrops into amazing images. In photography, the Golden Hour is when the streets are bathed in a beautiful golden light. It is a period shortly after sunrise or before sunset, during which daylight is warmer and softer, than when the Sun is higher in the sky. Again it occurs because the blue light waves are scattered, but the warm red light waves of the sunlight are still present. The term “hour” is used figuratively, there is no set time. Depending on your location and latitude it occurs from half an hour to an hour after sunrise or before sunset. It is easy to find this actual time frame in a Google search. So what type of photography is this light most suited for, well every type actually. Everything from Weddings, Portraits, Landscape and of course Street Photography. The shadows are less dense and the highlights are softer.

Depending on your season and location, this window of opportunity does not last long, so you have to shoot quickly, sometimes it will only last 10 minutes and then it is gone. I normally shoot on Auto White Balance, but your camera will assume your light is basically white, so if you set your White Balance to cloudy you will see the warmer light in the final image than is more evident to your eye. I prefer to leave my camera White Balance on Auto as I can adjust it in Lightroom to cloudy in the Basic Panel. When shooting in RAW, images will always look flat, I process the image to look how I remembered it to be.  I often increase the vibrance and drop the saturation as described in my last Blog, The Blue Hour.

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Have you photographed the Golden Hour in your city?