The Absolute BEST Time of Day to Take Pictures
October 20, 2022
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The BEST Time of Day to Take Pictures
If you’re letting your clients dictate when or where you do your photoshoots, then it’s time to STOP shooting in harsh, midday light. Today we’re writing all about ~Golden Hour~ and why it’s really the BEST time of day that you should be scheduling your photoshoots in.
Our students and other new photographers ask all the time: “What’s the best time of day to be shooting in?” Or even worse, we’ll see, “We have a session scheduled for tomorrow at 2:00 PM in a field! Help! How do I shoot in harsh, midday light!” And our answer in this video is: whenever possible, don’t!
Why “Golden Hour”?
If you’ve ever done a portrait session in the middle of the day, we probably don’t need to explain to you why we think that golden hour — which is the last hour or so before the sun sets — is the best time of day to shoot portraits of all kinds. If you’ve never gone outside and done a photoshoot during golden hour (which we’ve also heard referred to as the magic hour or miracle hour) then give it a shot! On the next bright and sunny day, go outside with a friend, and take a photo of them at noon with the sun directly over their head. Then, go outside with them again during golden hour and take another image with the sun behind them. You’ll know right away why people use words like “golden”, “miracle”, and “magic” to describe the light!
There are two reasons why golden hour is the best time of day for portraits: both the angle and the intensity of the sun are different right before sunset. You don’t need us to tell you that, for most of the day, the sun is basically right overhead, which means that any photos you take outside will have lots of harsh shadows beneath your subjects’ eyes and nose. And that same harsh overhead light also accentuates wrinkles and blemishes. But during golden hour, the sun can be fully behind your subject, meaning they can be standing in the middle of an open field, but have perfect smooth shade on their faces.
The intensity of sunlight is also different during golden hour. While the sun isn’t any less bright, as it approaches the horizon, the light that’s actually hitting you and your subjects starts to soften. These two effects together give that glowy, golden, dreamy vibe to your natural light photography!
As you can see, midday, direct light really accentuates blemishes and wrinkles, while golden hour backlighting really smooths the skin, while creating a dramy vibe!
Educate (And Empower) Your Clients
Here’s the thing that a lot of photographers — and especially newer photographers — forget: YOU are the professional! We know that at first you may not feel like it, and you may be self-conscious about the fact that you’re not as professional as so-and-so or haven’t done as many photoshoots as this other photographer in your town. But at the end of the day, in the relationship between you and your client, YOU are the photographer, and therefore YOU have the expertise and experience.
And because of that, you don’t need to always defer to whatever your clients want. And that’s especially true when they don’t realize that what they want is going to negatively impact their imagery! Of course, we can’t blame our clients for not knowing about golden hour. There are always going to be people who would rather shoot at midday than right in the middle of dinner time. So in their minds, if it’s all the same, why not shoot at the more convenient time?
And the answer is because it’s NOT all the same! As you now know, harsh midday light is going to be difficult to work with and yield unflattering results. So if your clients are pushing for midday, take the time to educate them about how much better they’ll look during golden hour. When you do that, you empower them to make the right decision for themselves.
For all of these reasons, when we have the ability to schedule photos — which is always the case for engagement sessions, as well as when we used to shoot family and senior sessions — we ALWAYS do it during golden hour. And if sunset doesn’t work, we might even use the second golden hour, which happens in the hour after sunrise (although sunrise sessions are rare for us). There are of course situations where we can’t schedule during golden hour, and we’ll address those later on in this post.
By the way, we want to very briefly interrupt this post, and make sure you know all about our free Facebook Community, Mastering the Wedding Photography Biz with Hunter and Sarah! This is a community of people just like you who are building their portrait and wedding photography businesses from the ground up.
We’re in that group almost every day sharing new content, starting conversations, and answering questions from our students. It’s also what we use to figure out what video content to make next. So if you want to have a say in what we produce, or just want to keep growing your business with a community of other photographers, click HERE to join!
Other Sunset Considerations
Anyway, back to golden hour. Let’s chat about a few things to think about when you’re scheduling your golden hour sessions. The first is that — since you’ve backed your session RIGHT up to the sunset, you CANNOT go late. If you or your clients show up 20 minutes late, it’s not like you can push the sunset back an extra 20 minutes. You just have to work more quickly, and be okay with fewer images. Because once the sun sets, you’re session is effectively over.
But assuming that you and your clients are all going to show up on time, here’s how we schedule our own sessions. The very first step is to just Google the date of the session, the location that you’re shooting in, and the word “sunset”. So we might Google, “October 20, 2022 Charlottesville, VA sunset”. You don’t even have to click on a result, because Google will usually give you the answer right away.
Just be sure to do this for every single session you schedule. Don’t assume that — just because the sunset was 6:15 PM last weekend means it’ll be 6:15 PM this weekend. The official sunset time can change by as much as a few minutes per day during the Spring and Fall, and if you live somewhere that practices daylight savings time, then you know that the time of sunset can change by an hour in a single day!
Once you have the “official” sunset, think about the location that you’re shooting at. Is there anything to the west of your location that may block the sun, and thus making it “set” earlier than the “official” sunset? Let’s use two extreme examples to get this point across. If you’re shooting a sunset session at the beach on the west coast, then the horizon is 100% flat, so the “official” sunset will be the “actual” sunset. The sun will be shining on you until the minute that it tucks behind the ocean.
On the other hand, there’s a location that we love shooting at here in Charlottesville where there’s a HUGE mountain immediately to the west. So during the summer months, the sun hits this mountain — effectively ending our session — a full 45 minutes ahead of what google tells us the sunset is.
This is why it’s good to scout a location ahead of time if at all possible. If you shoot at a location like this and just assume official sunset is the actual sunset, you could show up an hour before sunset to shoot, and run out of light 15 minutes in!
In the image on the left, the sun was setting over the ocean to the west of San Diego, meaning we shot RIGHT up until “official” sunset! But in the image on the right, those mountains rose so far above the horizon that we ended our session 30-40 minutes before the “official” sunset.
The other thing to think about is cloud cover. We know that not every day has bright, golden sunsets. If it looks like it’s going to be heavily overcast during golden hour, we often try to move the session up by about 30 minutes or so, as the heavy clouds block enough of the sun that it gets dark a bit earlier. The same goes if you’re shooting in the rain with umbrellas. Of course, the good news on those days it that you can shoot outside of golden hour and get much softer light all day long.
The image on the left was taken around 2:30 PM, while the image on right right was taken around 6:00 PM, a full 50 minutes before official sunset. But because it was overcast and rainy all day, the light stayed much more even than on a sunny day!
Sometimes, You Don’t Have a Choice (Shooting at Midday)…
Now, everything we’ve said above goes for when you’re scheduling your own sessions, and your clients are flexible. But we know that that isn’t always the case. If you’re photographing a family with small children, you’re often going to have to just work around their nap or bedtime schedules, no matter what the light looks like. We often end up doing surprise proposals in the middle of the day as well, since it’s more about being at the right place at the right time make the surprise happen than it is about getting perfect portraits.
And of course, if you shoot weddings, you NEED to be able to capture beautiful imagery in any light and at any point of the day. BUT. In every other situation, direct your clients to golden hour as much as you possibly can! Even on wedding days, we’ll often capture a first look as well as portraits with our couple and their wedding party and their families between 2:00 and 4:00 PM. But whether the sun is setting at 5:30 or 8:30, we always try to sneak them out for another 15 or 20 minutes during golden hour for those glowy, sunset portraits!
But, for all those days when you can’t help but shoot midday, we’ll have another video/post in the future all about shooting during midday light. But in the meantime, get out there and shoot some golden hour portraits!
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