“Let us drink together, fellows, as we did in days of yore. “The golden hours on angel wings Flew o’er me and my dearie, For dear to me as light and life Was my sweet Highland Mary.” - Robert Burns Don’t waste it with a false start or no start at all. Let your first hour set the theme of success and positive action that is certain to echo through your entire day. Look on the new day as another special gift from your Creator, another golden opportunity to complete what you were unable to finish yesterday. Then I get lost in the beauty of the morning sun and all of the magnificence that surrounds me.” – Debasish Mridha
“Every morning I wake up with an unknown, unexplainable joy of life.
“Don’t do small stuff early in your energy cycle or you’ll blow your ‘golden hours,’ but occasionally you have to do the ‘possible’ to develop the momentum for the killer task.” - Helen Gurley Brown “You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.” - James M. Like old age, it’s not yet over, but there’s no denying the time of day.” ― Vicki Covington “It was deep afternoon when shadows begin to grow, light becomes gold, and you realize that this particular day has reached its destiny. “Golden hours of vision come to us in this present life, when we are at our best, and our faculties work together in harmony.” - Charles Fletcher Dole “It was the Magic Hour, the moment in time when every leaf and blade of grass seemed to separate, when sunlight, burnished by the rain and softened by the coming night, gave the world an impossibly beautiful glow.” – Kristin Hannah Once blue hour fades, you get into true night – a time that’s challenging for photographers, but can still offer plenty of opportunities.“Once in a golden hour, I cast to earth a seed, And up there grew a flower, That others called a weed.” - Alfred Lord Tennyson Therefore, while blue hour is great, there are times you’ll want to avoid it altogether. Most moving subjects will be rendered as blurs, unless you compensate with a high ISO, which causes other problems – such as noise and reduced dynamic range. For instance, shooting action during blue hour is tough, because the world is just dark. So if you want to capture clean, non-noisy images, you’ll need a tripod.Īnd while a tripod will allow you to capture stunning blue hour landscapes and silky long exposures, the lack of strong light will limit your ability to photograph some subjects. Chief among these is the quantity of light blue hour lighting, while stunning, is very, very weak. Now, as with golden hour, blue hour lighting comes with some drawbacks. (Can you tell that I’m a huge fan of blue hour lighting? It’s simply amazing.) That’s why landscape photographers love shooting during blue hour, as do plenty of portrait photographers, street photographers, and architectural photographers.
Plus, as you can see in the examples above, blue hour skies are stunning, full of pastel blues, pinks, and yellows. On the other hand, golden hour lighting is great for plenty of photographic genres.įor instance, you can capture beautiful street photos in golden hour light, where you use the low sun to create long shadows: Related Post: Best Landscape Photography Settings Whenever I’m shooting flower photos at sunset, for instance, I work in the shade until the light has reached its golden hour peak, at which point I’ll come out into the sun and appreciate the soft, golden light. Specifically, while golden hour lighting offers great landscape and macro opportunities at peak softness, a slightly higher – but still golden! – sun often produces too much contrast to be useful. These relatively rapid changes can be annoying, especially as the light becomes unusable for certain subjects. While golden hour lighting is soft, as the sun gets farther from the horizon, it starts to harden – so that an hour after sunrise offers subtly harder lighting, and the light two hours after sunrise is harder still. Personally, I like golden hour, and I think it’s great for photographing quite a few subjects.īut it’s not the only type of light that’s great, and it does come with some drawbacks. In fact, it’s often referred to as the best light for photographers, and plenty of photography educators emphasize the importance of shooting during golden hour. Now, golden hour lighting is great for photography. Of course, to get true golden hour lighting, you can’t just head out around sunset and hope for the best the sky should be relatively clear, without clouds blocking the sun.