The Golden Hour, nature's own filter

The secret: know your sunrise and sunset times

Painters use paint, photographers use light. Are you fond of magic and gave up looking for it in daily life? Try photography. Even as a hobby, and even more so in the age of digital cameras, photography has one secret widely shared. It's a generous act from this point of view, maybe because that secret is not human-made and there are no copyright issues.

Its name is "the golden hour", the time frame shortly after sunrise and not long before sunset, when the Sun is low on the horizon and light travels less like an arrow and more like a fully spread-out peacock's tail. The scientific word for it is diffusion, the result of sunlight's longer journey through the atmosphere. Longer shadows are the material proof of the angle at which Sun starts and ends its day for any point of Earth.

Long before photographers started paying special attention to the "golden hour", painters identified another "golden interval". The arch-Renaissance artist and an astute observer of reality, Leonardo Da Vinci, is known for noticing that at dusk, the most ordinary, commonplace human face would look beautiful. The softness of the light is doing away with any harshness in features, it dissolves imperfections and bathes in a most flattering haze an otherwise banal appearance. As dusk is the darker part of twilight, that interval between sunset and total darkness, it not taken into account for the "golden hour". It is the same for dawn, which is between dark night and sunrise.

How would a longer "golden hour" work if it extended a bit more than the 30 to 60 minutes after sunrise or before sunset? Technology has answered this question with special camera settings, all based around the stubborn attempt at grabbing as much light as possible. Some cameras, expensive ones and their mobile phone versions come also equipped with a "golden hour" filter, the equivalent of a cook's cheat Christmas, passed as the fruit of long hot hours in the kitchen when it was actually a ready-made meal.

Nature's original filter is out there for anyone to use it, provided one gets an idea of good timing. As the Earth is not flat and it's still moving on its own axis and round the Sun, there will be variations according to geographical coordinates and time of the year. Latitude is important and so is the season. A "golden hour" calculator, such as the tool below, is just an ingredient in the process of taking a good photo.