Why shoot at blue hour?
More and more during my landscape sessions I’ve been leveraging the opportunities of blue hour to build my knowledge and portfolio. Golden hour is often lauded by photographers as the best time to shoot images because the light is so complimentary to the landscape, and I was certainly a part of this camp for a long time. There are definitely circumstances where I’d still agree with this, but shooting at blue hour has often produced more consistent results in my portfolio, and I wanted to discuss why I think that is.
A large reason for this has been the disproportionate attention I’ve paid to developed urban areas in the past few years. Moving to London and travelling more in Europe means my camera and I explore cities rather than rural areas, and cities are vastly more dynamic in their colour range and creative opportunity than that of a field. Living in Australia meant I’d explore rural or coastal areas more frequently, as such I was chasing golden hour and that’s resulted in a fairly well rounded portfolio, in my opinion. But shooting in cities means the headlights, street lights and office lights of the buildings come alive enough to light up and detail the foreground that would otherwise be cast in shadow. From top to bottom you will get a more even image, which is a priority in my style.
Continuing on from this, blue hour allows for a more dynamic street style. Shooting some streets in London (Piccadilly Circus in particular) is greatly aided by having some colour in the sky, compared to just darkness; it alleviates an otherwise potentially discordant image where you have too many shadows and too many highlights. Without knowing it, most people would find something like that uncomfortable to view unless it was an aid to your storytelling.
In shooting blue hour quite frequently over the past few years, I’ve noticed myself shying my camera away from the sun’s setting location, and shooting either away from or panned from it. It’s allowed for a more subtle gradient in the sky that’s been more forgiving when I come to edit my images. Shooting directly into the sun can create an overwhelming amount of highlights in your image just above the horizon, that when editing out will sacrifice detail in your shadows as the compromise. Shying away from the sun means I no longer need to compromise that final product, obviously this is very much location dependent.
Where I can’t shy away from the sun, my strategy is to use ND graduated filters to soften up the skyline. The camera reads the scene as being darker than it is and compensates usually by increasing the shutter speed, the filter being in place will temper the skyline and add detail to the foreground. There is always an element of experimentation here, of course, and it won’t always garner the intended result (depending on your settings, your location etc), but overall this is a strategy for consistently creating a more even image across your scene.
The one cheat code I have if you don’t have any filters is to include some water. Often water in photography is best leveraged when capturing movement, however during the day this is hard to achieve without compromising something else. Blue hour allows enough detail in your scene to give the image colour and vibrancy, whilst being dark enough to facilitate movement in your scene, and the light reflection in your water source will compensate for the dark foreground in your scene. Rivers and canals are great for this, but the opportunity extends to cars, buses and sometimes people. In a busy tourist location (like St. Marks Square in Venice), having people in the scene can detract from your image, especially when they’re frozen: shooting during blue hour allows for a view of the square but enough room for movement that the people become pawns to aid your creativity, rather than hindrances to it. Capturing slow moving cars on Tower Bridge is more feasible when it’s dark enough to do so without the highlights of the headlights being jarring to your viewer. Put simply, blur hour combines the benefits of daylight with that of the activity of night life.
But, the biggest advantage to shooting blue hour over golden hour is simply that people don’t think to shoot then, so the crowds of photographers are fewer and the opportunity to create something unique is higher. Shooting in Venice I wrote about the idea of Vemödalen: the fear that every photo has already been captured by everyone else. Shooting on location can sometimes be as challenging as knowing you have to shoot something unique in a place that’s been overly photographed throughout history on your first attempt for it to have value. Which is especially challenging when you’re at your most creatively overwhelmed your first time in a location. Going somewhere multiple times forces you to think on your feet more aptly, one way of stacking the numbers in your favour is simply to shoot at blue hour. To say nothing of the fact it’s a more peaceful shooting experience.
Blue hour, when you can get it right will be your camera’s best friend. I’d encourage you, the next time you shoot sunset to wait an extra hour and see what you can create from the sky being a deeper, richer blue than the mundane tones of mid daylight, and you’re able to leverage movement as a creative device to your images.
