Golden Hour Photography: How to Shoot in Perfect Light

Golden hour is the time just after sunrise and just before sunset when the sun is low in the sky, roughly within 6 degrees of the horizon, and its light turns warm, comes in from the side and throws long shadows. It matters because the same scene that looks flat and harsh at noon gains color, texture and depth in that light, which is why it sits behind so many good sunset photographs, portraits and landscapes.

It is not an hour, and it does not start at a fixed time. It is a sun angle, and once you understand that, you can predict it, measure it with your own shadow, and use each direction of the light on purpose. This page works through why the light changes, how long it lasts where you are, how to read it, and how to set the camera for it.

Why the light changes when the sun is low

Two things happen as the sun drops toward the horizon, and both come from its angle.

The light gets warmer. Sunlight near the horizon passes through far more air before it reaches you. At 6 degrees above the horizon the path is about 9 times as long as from a sun straight overhead, and at the horizon itself about 38 times. Air scatters short blue wavelengths more than long red ones, so the longer the path, the more blue is lost from the direct beam and the more orange and red is left. The color temperature of direct sunlight drops from around 5,500 K in the middle of the day to roughly 3,500 K in golden hour and nearer 2,000 K as the sun touches the horizon.

The light comes from the side. A low sun lights vertical surfaces, faces and walls straight on, and it skims across the ground. Every bump in the terrain casts a shadow, so texture and shape that vanish under a high sun suddenly show.

The quickest way to learn the difference is to compare. Pick the photo below you think was made in golden hour, then read why.

Which photo was shot during golden hour?

A B

Warm, but not soft

Golden hour light is often called soft. That is half right. The sun is still a tiny source in the sky, so it gives hard light: the edges of its shadows are crisp. What changes is the contrast. The thick air dims the direct beam a lot, while the light from the open sky dims much less. The sky fills the shadows, so the lighting ratio between the lit side and the shadow side drops. Faces look gentler and highlights clip less easily, but you still get the long, sharp-edged shadows that a cloudy day never gives you. Think “hard light at low contrast”, not “soft light”.

Warm light, blue shadows

The shadows are not neutral. Anything the sun does not reach is lit by the sky, and the sky is blue. So in golden hour you get warm orange highlights sitting next to cool blue shadows in the same frame. That warm and cool contrast is a large part of why golden hour photos look rich, and it is why snow, sand and pale walls are such good subjects: they show both colors clearly.

How long golden hour lasts, and why it varies

There is no official definition. Most planning tools count golden hour as the time the sun spends between the horizon and 6 degrees above it. Others start it a few degrees below the horizon, for example from 4 degrees below to 6 above, because the sky is already colored before the sun appears. Two apps can give you two different times for the same evening and both be right by their own rule.

How long it lasts depends on how fast the sun climbs or sinks, and that depends on your latitude. At the equator the sun rises and sets almost straight up and down, at about 15 degrees an hour. Further from the equator its path is tilted, so it covers the same few degrees of height more slowly. Around the equinoxes in March and September, the rate is close to 15 degrees an hour times the cosine of your latitude. That gives these durations:

Away from the equinoxes, golden hour runs longer at mid and high latitudes, because the sun’s path is even more tilted. In winter at high latitudes it can last all day: at 60 degrees north in late December the sun never gets more than about 6.5 degrees above the horizon, so the whole short day is golden hour.

Your surroundings change it too. A ridge, a tree line or a city skyline to the west can put you in shadow while the sun is still 3 or 4 degrees up, so your evening golden hour may end 15 or 20 minutes before the official sunset. Mountains to the east delay it in the morning. The Golden Hour Calculator gives the times for any place and date; it cannot see the hill behind you, so look at the horizon in the direction of the sun as well.

Want to know where on the horizon the sun will set, not only when? Plan a photo around the sun, moon and tides covers azimuth and elevation and why the sunset point moves through the year.

Read it from your own shadow

You do not need an app to know when you are in golden hour. A shadow’s length is the object’s height divided by the tangent of the sun’s elevation, so your shadow tells you the sun’s angle:

The rule to remember: when your shadow is about ten times your height, you are in golden hour. When it is about as long as you are tall, the sun is near 45 degrees and the light is ordinary daylight. Watching shadows stretch is also the best way to feel how quickly the window closes.

Morning or evening

The geometry is the same at both ends of the day, so the light is closely related. The differences come from the air and from people. Mornings are often still, cool and clear, with mist or dew that burns off later, and popular places are quiet. Evenings often carry more haze and dust from the day, which can warm the light further, and you can watch the light build and plan as it does. Neither is always better. Pick by what the subject needs: mist and calm water point to morning, and a western view points to evening.

Planning a dawn start? Sunrise Photography covers the timeline before first light, reading the forecast and scouting the day before.

Reading the sky: clouds, haze and smoke

Golden hour is not always golden. What the air holds decides what the light looks like, so check the sky as well as the clock.

• Clear, dry air gives clean, bright, warm light and a plain sky. Good for raking light on a landscape or a portrait, less good when the sky is meant to be the subject.
• High, broken cloud (thin streaks or patches high up) catches color from below after the sun has dropped, so the sky can light up orange and pink. This is what most dramatic sunsets need.
• A solid cloud bank on the horizon blocks the low sun, and golden hour simply does not happen, even when the sky overhead is clear. A gap just above the horizon can let a short, intense burst of light through under the clouds.
• Haze, dust and smoke scatter even more light. A little warms things up; a lot turns the sun into a dull red disk and the light on the land goes weak and muddy.

A good habit, used by many landscape photographers, is to watch the same spot over several evenings instead of trusting one forecast. You learn where the sun goes down, what the horizon does to it, and which kind of sky makes that view work.

Using the light by its direction

Where you stand relative to the sun decides what golden hour light does to a scene. Each direction of light has a different job.

Side light for texture and shape

With the sun at about 90 degrees to the way you are facing, shadows fall across the frame and every ridge, ripple and brick gets a lit side and a dark side. This is the light for landscapes, dunes, fields, rock and old buildings, and anything where texture is the point. The dune photo here is side lit. Use the long shadows themselves as lines in the frame. A polarizing filter works best at right angles to the sun, so it suits side-lit scenes; pointed toward the low sun it does almost nothing to the sky.

Pick the photo below that shows the surface texture more strongly, then read what the light is doing in each.

Which photo shows the surface texture more strongly?

A B

Front light for warm color

With the sun behind you, the light falls straight onto the subject. Shadows fall behind things, so you lose depth, but color is at its strongest and the warmth is plain to see. It works well on faces of buildings, cliffs and trees that face the sun, and it is the easiest golden hour light to expose, because nothing bright is in the frame. Look for a darker or cooler background behind a lit subject: the contrast in color does the work that shadows do in side light. Watch for your own shadow, which at this angle is very long and can reach into the bottom of the frame.

Backlight for glow and rim light

With the sun in front of you and behind the subject, the edges light up. Hair, fur, grass and the outline of a shoulder catch a bright line of rim light, and thin things such as leaves, petals and ears glow as light passes through them. This is the classic golden hour portrait light.

The problem is exposure. The bright sky behind the subject pulls the camera meter toward a darker exposure, so a face in front of it comes out too dark. Fix it in one of three ways: use spot metering on the face, add +1 to +2 stops of exposure compensation, or set the exposure manually from the face and let the background go bright. To light the face itself, a reflector in front of the subject bounces the low sun back; pale sand or concrete does the same job less strongly. Put the sun just behind the head, or behind a tree, so a sliver of it lights the edges without filling the frame with glare.

Want backlight worked through in more depth? Backlighting: Silhouettes, Rim Light, and Dramatic Effects covers where to put the light, the subject and the background, and how to expose for each.

Silhouettes

Use the same backlight but expose for the sky instead of the subject, and the subject turns into a dark shape against color. Meter a bright part of the sky away from the sun itself, or start from -1 to -2 stops of compensation. A silhouette only works if the shape reads, so pick clear outlines: a person in profile, a tree with spread branches, a cyclist on a ridge. Keep separate shapes apart so they do not merge into one dark mass. Silhouettes work best in the last minutes before sunset or the first after sunrise, when the sky has the most color, and they keep working into the twilight after the sun is gone.

Flare and sun stars

Shooting toward a low sun brings lens flare: haze, streaks and colored spots. A little warm haze can add mood; a lot washes out contrast and hides the subject. Small shifts of the camera change it a great deal, so move until it helps, and check the screen. To turn the sun into a star with points, partly hide it behind an edge such as a branch or a building corner and stop down to about f/11 to f/16 (star-shaped lens flare covers the details). Smaller apertures such as f/22 make the points a little longer but soften the whole frame through diffraction. A lens with an even number of aperture blades gives that many points; an odd number gives twice as many.

Wondering what a hood really blocks, and when to take it off? Lens Hood covers what a hood stops, why its depth depends on focal length, and when it gets in the way.

Camera settings for golden hour

White balance. The Daylight preset assumes light of about 5,500 K. Golden hour light is lower than that, so with Daylight set, the camera records it as warm, which is what your eye saw. Auto white balance tries to make light look neutral and may remove some of that warmth, though many cameras deliberately keep part of it. Cloudy or Shade presets add more warmth on top. If you shoot RAW, the setting can be changed later without loss, but setting Daylight in the camera shows you the real color on the screen while you shoot.

To see what the white balance setting can and cannot do, try it in the camera simulator: set a white balance at least 1500K higher than the color temperature of the light and watch the scene turn golden. Then look at what stayed the same: the direction of the light and the length of the shadows.

Want the other challenges? The full camera simulator has all 21, across eight scenes.

Exposure and metering. Front and side light meter easily. Backlight and silhouettes need a decision: expose for the subject or for the sky. When the sky near the sun is far brighter than the ground, more than the dynamic range of one frame can hold, bracket three or five frames a stop or two apart and blend them later.

Not sure how spot metering differs from matrix and center-weighted? Camera Metering Modes Explained compares them, with settings for scenes like these.

Aperture. Choose it for depth of field as at any other time: f/8 to f/11 for a landscape sharp from front to back, a wide aperture such as f/1.8 to f/2.8 to blur the background behind a portrait. Backlit highlights in that blur turn into warm, round bokeh. Use f/11 to f/16 for a sun star.

ISO and shutter speed. The light falls the whole way through golden hour, and faster near the end. The dune photo above was exposed at 1/50, f/8 and ISO 100 in low sun: three stops more exposure than the sunny 16 rule gives for full midday sun (1/100 at f/16), and the light keeps falling from there. Start at a low ISO, check your shutter speed every few minutes, and raise ISO as needed. Handheld, a starting point is a shutter speed of at least 1 over the focal length, using the full-frame equivalent on a smaller sensor; stabilization lets you go slower, but a moving subject still needs a fast shutter. See camera shake for the details. In the last minutes, a tripod lets you keep ISO low.

Editing golden hour photos

Golden hour files usually need less editing than midday ones. The aim is to keep what you saw, not to make it more orange.

• Set white balance first. Start near Daylight and adjust until white things look like white things in warm light, not orange and not gray.
• Recover the sky, then lift the shadows. Bring the highlights down until the sky near the sun shows color, then lift shadows only until the foreground has detail. Pushing both hard gives a flat, gray look.
• Keep the blue in the shadows. The cool shadows are part of the light. Warming the whole picture to remove them makes everything one flat orange.
• Go easy on saturation. Warm light already pushes reds and oranges. A small rise in vibrance looks better than a big jump in saturation, which can clip the sky into flat orange.
• Watch skin. If faces look orange, cool the white balance a little or lower the saturation of the orange range only. Skin tones are the first thing viewers notice when the color is wrong.

Golden hour and blue hour

Once the sun is a few degrees below the horizon, golden hour gives way to blue hour, the twilight when the only light is the glow of the sky. It is cool, even and shadowless, with none of golden hour’s direction, and it is much dimmer, so a tripod and long exposures take over. City lights balance with the sky in this window. The minutes on either side of sunset often hold both: warm color low on the horizon fading to blue overhead. Stay after the sun goes down; the sky often has its best color 10 to 20 minutes later.

Common mistakes and misconceptions about golden hour

• Thinking it is an hour at a fixed time. It is a sun angle. It can be 25 minutes long or last all day, and it moves with the season. Check the times, and check the horizon.
• Expecting soft light. The shadows are long and sharp. What drops is the contrast. If you need truly soft light, use open shade or an overcast day.
• Arriving at the start time. Be set up 20 to 30 minutes before. The light changes every few minutes and the best part can be over quickly, especially if a ridge or a cloud bank cuts it short.
• Making it golden in the edit. Warming a midday photo in software changes the color, not the direction or the shadows, and it looks like it. And over-warming a real golden hour photo removes the blue shadows that made it work.
• Trusting a clear forecast for sky color. A clear sky gives good light on the land and a plain sky. A cloud bank on the horizon can cancel the whole thing. High, broken cloud is what colors the sky.
• Underexposing backlit faces. The bright background fools the meter. Spot meter the face or add +1 to +2 stops.
• Shooting only into the sun. Turn around and look sideways. The side light on texture and the front light on color are often the better pictures.
• Packing up at sunset. The sky often peaks after the sun has gone, and blue hour follows.

Try this: one spot, every five minutes

Pick a place you can reach in the evening with a clear view west, and a subject with some texture or a pale surface: a wall, a tree, a fence, sand or snow. Set the camera, or the phone in its pro mode, to Daylight white balance so the color is not changed from frame to frame. Stand in the same spot.

1. About 45 minutes before sunset, take one frame of the scene. Note the time and pace out your shadow, or a friend’s, in steps.
2. Take the same frame every 5 minutes until 15 minutes after sunset, measuring the shadow each time.
3. At least once, turn so the sun is at your side, and once so it is behind your subject, and take those frames too.

At home, line the frames up in order and judge them on four things: how long the shadows are, how warm the light is, what color the shadows are, and how dark the shadows are compared with the lit parts. Find the frame where your shadow was about ten times your height, and see whether that is where the light started to change. You will also see where your own horizon ended the light, which no calculator knows. Doing this once on a clear evening and once with clouds teaches more about golden hour than any app.

Want to compare golden hour with the other light a day gives you? Natural Light Photography covers the whole day, from open shade and overcast to golden hour and window light.

Questions about golden hour photography

How long does golden hour last?

Between about 25 minutes and well over an hour at each end of the day, depending on your latitude, the season and which definition your app uses. Near the equator it is shortest; at 45 degrees it is about 35 to 55 minutes around the equinoxes, and longer in summer and winter.

Does golden hour happen on cloudy days?

Not if a cloud bank sits on the horizon where the sun is, because the low sun cannot reach you. If there is a gap between the cloud and the horizon, the sun can shine underneath it for a few minutes, and that light, bouncing off the cloud above, can be the best of the day.

Why do my golden hour photos come out less warm than I remember?

Usually auto white balance has removed some of the warmth. Set Daylight white balance, or shoot RAW and set it later. Also, your eyes adapt to the light, so a scene can feel more golden in memory than it measured.

Is golden hour the same as magic hour?

In photography the two names are used for the same thing. Some people use magic hour more loosely to cover golden hour and blue hour together, the whole time the light is changing around sunrise and sunset.

Can I shoot golden hour with a phone?

Yes. The light does the work, not the camera. Tap to set exposure on the lit part of the scene so the sky does not blow out, lower the exposure slightly for silhouettes, and turn off any warm filter so you see the real color.

Want to check what you know about hard light, soft light and natural light? Try the Photography Lighting Quiz.