In our blog we will regularly post photography tips and tricks that will help you improve the quality of your photographs. Today we start with tip #1. One of the most important rules that will help improve your photographs is very simple yet very often overlooked by many photographers : “shoot at the right time of day”.

Two periods of the day are specifically very interesting for taking outdoor photographs : morning and evening golden hour.

The quality of the light is mostly at its best during golden hour, also called magic hour. Magic hour is the period around sunrise and sunset (when the sun is between the 6 degrees above and 6 degrees under the horizon). At these moments the light is beautiful and pictures just seem to turn out better. Interesting long shadows, orange skies and amazing reflections of the sun on the clouds contribute to the overall quality of the picture.

I have shot thousands of pictures with dull lighting because they were shot during the day. I have learned my lesson and all my pictures with great light are shot during these two periods of golden hour. Of course, it will require some effort and planning because the timeslot we have for photographing during golden hour is limited. So we need to be ready, on location, at the right spot, to start shooting and capture the great light.

There exist several good apps for the smartphone to track the timeslots of magic hour and set alarms and etc, but I will talk about these apps in another blogpost soon.

So respect this simple and basic rule and your photographs will drastically improve in quality of light and quality of color.

More photography tips and tricks will follow soon.

I will be happy to hear your thoughts on this.

Happy Shooting!