Golden Hour

The sun sits low, so the light comes in sideways, travels through more atmosphere and arrives warm. Long shadows run across the ground and every edge picks up a rim.

It flatters almost everything, which is why so many schedules are built around it. It is also the hardest to schedule, because it lasts a short time and then it is gone.

The window runs while the sun sits below roughly six degrees of elevation. At mid latitudes that is around an hour after sunrise and before sunset, and near the equator it can be twenty minutes.

Low sun means the light is directional and horizontal, so faces are lit from the side and shadows stretch several times the height of whatever casts them.

Colour warms as the sun drops, from around 4000K down toward 2500K at the horizon, and haze in the air softens the shadow edges as it goes.

Use it for endings, for arrivals, for romance, and for landscapes where long shadows describe the ground.

Skip it when a scene has to run long. Real golden hour changes minute by minute, and cutting a lengthy conversation together across it is a continuity problem.

Blue hour comes after golden hour, once the sun is below the horizon. The sky still carries light, and that light is cool and comes from everywhere rather than from one low point.

The check is whether the sun is visible in the sky. A warm low sun and long shadows is golden hour. A blue glow with no sun and no shadows is blue hour.

Nestor Almendros shot much of Days of Heaven (1978) during the short window after sunset, working perhaps twenty minutes a day. Terrence Malick and Emmanuel Lubezki used long stretches of natural low sun again in The Tree of Life (2011).

The sun comes back high and the shadows shorten. Say the sun is low on the horizon and that the shadows are long, since high sun cannot produce the look at any colour temperature.

The second failure is warmth with no direction, which is a grade rather than a time of day. Name the side the sun comes from and ask for a rim on the hair.