![]() ![]() If you used a light meter to measure the sunlight, the sensor would measure literally tens of thousands of times more energy coming from the sun than from light reflected in shadows. Suppose you’re sitting in a dark room with a window open on a sunny day. I say more about this in the subsequent post. Photographs are not objective recordings of reality, nor are paintings direct depictions of the artist’s experience. This, along with my previous post on perspective, are part of a broader theme of how paintings and photographs arise from artistic and technical choices. Nowadays, our mobile phone photos are getting better and better, applying much more sophisticated-but hidden-aesthetic choices. Photographic tone reflects many choices made by the photographer and the camera manufacturer. We may tend to think of photographs as just objectively recording light and displaying it. This post describes some of the choices involved in photographic tone reproduction, that is, how bright or dim each part of a photo is. It is the best time of day for natural photography when diffuse and warm light is desired.Note: some of this post has been incorporated into a paper in Journal of Vision. ![]() In landscape photography, the warm color of the low sun is often considered desirable to enhance the colours of the scene. This harsh lighting problem is particularly important in portrait photography, where a fill flash is often necessary to balance lighting across the subject's face or body, filling in strong shadows that are usually considered undesirable.īecause the contrast is less during the golden hour, shadows are less dark, and highlights are less likely to be overexposed. The degree to which overexposure can occur varies because different types of film and digital cameras have different dynamic ranges. In the middle of the day, the bright overhead sun can create strong highlights and dark shadows. For a location sufficiently far from the equator, the sun may not reach an altitude of 10°, and the golden hour lasts for the entire day in certain seasons. For a location closer to the Equator, the same altitude is reached in less than an hour, and for a location farther from the equator, the altitude is reached in more than one hour. In Los Angeles, California, at an hour after sunrise or an hour before sunset, the sun has an altitude of about 10–12°. ![]() The character of the lighting is determined by the sun's altitude, and the time for the sun to move from the horizon to a specified altitude depends on a location's latitude and the time of year. The term hour is used figuratively the effect has no clearly defined duration and varies according to season and latitude. In addition, the sun's low angle above the horizon produces longer shadows. More blue light is scattered, so if the sun is present, its light appears more reddish. This is technically a type of lighting diffusion. When the sun is low above the horizon, sunlight rays must penetrate the atmosphere for a greater distance, reducing the intensity of the direct light, so that more of the illumination comes from indirect light from the sky, reducing the lighting ratio. The color temperature can also change significantly with altitude, latitude, season, and weather conditions. It tends to be around 2,000 K shortly after sunrise or before sunset, around 3,500 K during "golden hour", and around 5,500 K at midday. This is when the sun is at a significant depth below the horizon, when residual, indirect sunlight takes on a predominantly blue shade, and there are no sharp shadows because the sun either has not risen, or has already set.ĭetails The color temperature of daylight varies with the time of day. The period of time shortly before the magic hour at sunrise, or after it at sunset, is called the " blue hour". During these times, the brightness of the sky matches the brightness of streetlights, signs, car headlights and lit windows. The golden hour is also sometimes called the "magic hour," especially by cinematographers and photographers. In photography, the golden hour is the period of daytime shortly after sunrise or before sunset, during which daylight is redder and softer than when the sun is higher in the sky. Comparison of daylight versus the golden hour at Newbury Racecourse
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