Shooting in blue hour

Blue hour is the period just after sunset, or just before sunrise, when the sun is below the horizon and the sky fills with an even, deep blue light. For city photography it is often more useful than the night itself: the sky still has colour and detail, and the lights in windows and on streets are already on.

A few things that help:

• Arrive early. Blue hour is short, usually well under an hour, and it passes faster the closer you are to the equator. Set up while there is still daylight, so you are composing calmly instead of rushing.
• Use a tripod. Light falls quickly, and shutter speeds stretch from fractions of a second to several seconds. A tripod lets you keep ISO low and the image clean.
• Watch the balance. The best frames often come when the brightness of the sky roughly matches the brightness of the buildings. Too early and the lights look weak; too late and the sky goes black.
• Shoot RAW and take several frames. The colour shifts minute by minute. RAW files give room to adjust white balance afterwards, and a sequence lets you choose the moment you like best.
• Check the histogram, not the screen. In the dark, the camera screen looks brighter than the file really is.

Blue hour rewards patience more than equipment. The same view can look flat at sunset and quietly beautiful twenty minutes later.

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Photos: jaboczw, tingyaoh on Pixabay, used under the Pixabay Content License. These are not my photographs.