

One of THE MOST important things when shooting at golden hour for me is finding a tree/bush/building/object to filter a bit of that light. Sometimes I will start my sessions a bit before that just to give myself some time to settle in and get started, but you definitely do not want to be shooting hours before that if your goal is to shoot during golden hour. You definitely want to make sure that you are shooting early in the morning or late in the evening in order to ensure you are shooting during golden hour. Often times I’m scheduling my sessions months in advance so I can get on the app and see when golden hour will be either in the morning or at night on an exact day months from now. I personally use the app Helios to tell me when sunset will be in my area at a certain time of the year. Your positioning as the photographer is also key in these cases.īest Practices for Shooting During Golden Hour In that case I will actually use my subjects and their heads and bodies to break the light up a little bit. Sometimes I will be shooting at a location where there are not any objects on the horizon that I can use to filter some of that low golden hour light. There are no trees or objects to filter the light during golden hour I never want every single picture I take to have a huge sun flare across someone’s face and body, however I almost always include a few images with a nice flare because I do love them! This one is more of a preference thing in my opinion, but you definitely want to make sure when you do it, it’s intentional. This one I don’t totally mind personally. If you have the sun completely blocked by something on the horizon line, this can cause your subjects to be too dark. Ideally you want to make sure you’re letting in enough light and positioning yourself in the right way to avoid your subjects being too dark. It’s really a pretty easy fix!Īgain, this one is fixable in Lightroom and Photoshop using radial filters. This happens when you are letting too much light into your lens during the shot. However, too much haze can make your subjects difficult to see and you can lose some sharpness. That is definitely the first step, but here are some of the problems photographers face and after I’ll share tips to help you avoid some of these!Ī little bit of haze is no big deal- some photographers actually prefer it! There is even a slider in Lightroom where you can fix it a bit.


Unfortunately it’s not as easy as just going outside with your camera and taking pictures with the sun behind your subjects.

You can check out some favorite golden hour sessions of mine here, here, and here.įirst let’s talk about the most common issues people can have while shooting during golden hour. After many years and lots of practice, I have put together a list of things to remember when shooting at golden hour.
#GOLDEN HOUR TIME PHOTOS HOW TO#
When I first started my photography business I was also constantly Googling how to successfully shoot during this time. One of the most popular questions I see asked in photography groups is how to shoot during golden hour. Such factors include weather conditions, where you live in the world, how high or low you are in elevation, the season, etc. I say roughly, because there are many factors that play into that best golden sunlight. Golden hour, so deeply loved by many photographers, is roughly the first hour after sunrise each day and the last hour before sunset.
