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I’m sure you’ve probably realized by now that lighting is a pretty critical thing when it comes to photography. And you’ve probably already figured out there’s already a really good, free lightbulb out there called the sun. The thing is, there’s more to using the sun than just going outside.

First of all, let’s discuss the time of day. Usually, you’re not going to want to shoot right in the middle of the day – especially if you’re going to take a lot of landscape shots where you want both the sky and the foreground in the same shot. I’ll show you two reasons why:

This photo was taken of an apartment building in Chicago around noon. It’s a really pretty courtyard, but the suns hurting the picture more than helping. First of all, there’s a really harsh shadow right down the middle of the picture because of the sun being so high in the sky – it was impossible for me to meter properly for both the left and right sides of the building, causing the left side to be slightly over-exposed and the right to be slightly under-exposed. Plus, the sky was SO BRIGHT that I had to edit it in order to make it not Super Over Exposed. I did a really horrible job of editing, btw, but I didn’t think the picture was really worth putting forth my best effort, so I did my lazy version of fixing it. (on a side note, can you imagine living there and walking into that courtyard everyday and knowing “I live here!”? I can’t imagine. It’s so beautiful.)

Here’s another example:

This photo was taken about an hour later in downtown Chicago. Look at the difference between the sky and the foreground. So bright versus so dark.

Ok, so if noon is not a good time to shoot, what is a good time? Well, they call it the Golden Hour and it’s in (approximately) the hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset – basically when the sun is low in the sky. When the sun is low, it’s softer and warmer (color-wise, that is) and the contrast between highlights and shadows isn’t quite so intense, which means get pictures that are more even, pleasant to the eye, and require less editing. For instance, take a look at this photo, taken at about 7:30PM in Akron, OH (which, btw, was probably about a half hour or more before the Golden Hour technically started):

There was no editing done to this photo, but notice how you can see the blues of the sky and the greens of the trees and how much warmer it looks than either of the Chicago photos. Another KEY POINT of this photo is that I’m shooting with my BACK to the sun. When I shot into the sun at the same time of day, I actually got something like this:

It’s a pretty picture (in my opinion), and I like the feel of it, but it’s complete different than the other one, isn’t it? Same pond, same day, same time of day, completely different feel. I hung around for an hour and I was able to actually watch the sunset, and took this photo actually doing that precious “golden hour”:

Just an hour makes a pretty big difference in the sky and reflection in the pond, huh?

One fun side effect of the Golden Hour are the fun “long-legged” shadow pictures you can take… like this fun shot of me:

This is just a glimpse into the golden hour. If you do a search on the internet for photos taken during the golden hour, some of them will just amaze you. I’ve barely scratched the surface here.

So. When exactly is the Golden Hour for you? Check out this website. Right below the map, switch the dropdown to “Show all events in LOCAL time” and then you can hover over each of the golden rectangles and it will tell you the exact times of days for YOUR golden hour:

One last thing: I’m really glad that John bought me a small flashlight for me to stick in my camera bag, because it’s come in handy walking back to my car after getting all these sunset shots lately :)

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