> 4 minute read

The Golden Hour and Blue Hour

The golden hour and blue hour are some of the best times to be outside with your camera, especially when you’re on holiday. But they don’t last for long, so you’ll need to be prepared. Here’s how to make this light work for you.

You’ve probably noticed how amazing the light looks towards the start and end of the day. You may even have heard photographers referring to magical times like ‘the golden hour’ and ‘the blue hour’ as being the best times to be outdoors with a camera – not only when framing landscapes, but also for portraits and details, too.

• The golden hour refers to the time just before sunset (or just after sunrise) when the sun is low down in the sky. The light is much warmer and more directional, so it picks out details in the landscape better.
• The blue hour, on the other hand, occurs just after sunset (or just before sunrise) when the sun is only just below the horizon. The sky takes on an inky blue colour, against which the bright lights of a city look amazing.

Let’s have a look at which subjects look good in these conditions and how best to photograph at these times.

The Golden Hour

The light of the golden hour is not as bright as that of the midday sun, but it’s still bright enough to photograph handheld. The warmer, softer light will give your subject’s skin a wonderful glow, which is why it’s the perfect time to create individual or group portraits of family and friends who you’re away with – they’ll definitely thank you for it! Opening up your lens’s aperture will help get in enough light to give you the fast shutter speed you need, and it will also create gorgeous out-of-focus regions behind your subject that will really make them ‘pop’ off the background.

© Xing Liu

© Xing Liu

The golden hour is also good for landscape photography. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you have to photograph into the setting/rising sun; look behind you and you’ll see the scenery that’s bathed with the golden light from the sun looks amazing, too. Bear in mind that the light levels will be dropping, and you might want to use a smaller aperture for front-to-back sharpness, so you’ll either need to raise the ISO sensitivity or, better still, use a tripod. You can make a picture without wobbling the camera by using its self-timer, or the remote shooting function on the FUJIFILM Camera Remote smartphone app.

A word about white balance here: Auto White Balance (AWB) may try to correct for the orange glow of golden hour and make it look like regular daylight. If this happens, try one of the white balance presets such as Daylight or Shade instead. This will preserve the warmth of the ambient light.

The Blue Hour

Unlike the golden hour, the blue hour doesn’t actually last for very long at all – certainly not 60 minutes! This means you need to be super prepared in order not to miss the photo; planning is vital.

If you want to photograph a specific landmark, you can use online tools like Google Maps to work out where you need to stand and in which direction the sun will have set. It’s also worth doing a preliminary trip in daylight to make sure you know what the view will look like when the sun goes down.

Blue hour is nowhere near as bright as the golden hour, so you’ll need to use a tripod to get the very best images. Again, use a two-second self-timer or the FUJIFILM Camera Remote app to make pictures without wobbling the camera and causing blur.

It’s also a good idea to bracket your exposures when you’re photographing in the blue hour, and to shoot Raw files that give you more flexibility to lighten and darken different parts of the picture selectively in post-production. You can bracket yourself by turning the exposure compensation dial, by adjusting the shutter speed and aperture manually, or you can use your camera’s auto bracketing function, which makes the whole job a lot easier.

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As with the golden hour, try using a white balance preset, such as Daylight or Shade, if you find that your camera’s Auto White Balance setting is correcting for the blue light in the sky.

Your Next Steps

• CHALLENGE We want to see your best golden-hour and blue-hour pictures. Post them to social media with the hashtags #learnwithfujifilm. You can also submit your work here for a chance to be featured on our social media channels.