Field notes · sunhour blog
Writing about light, twilight, and planning the shoot.
Photographer-leaning posts on golden hour, blue hour, the science of twilight, moon phases, and how to plan around them in any city on Earth. RSS.
Polar Day and Polar Night: Why They Exist
Above 66.5 degrees the sun stops behaving. Polar day is weeks of unbroken sunlight; polar night is weeks where the sun never rises. Here is the geometry.
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Sunset Time for Any City: Why It Varies Between Two Streets
The official sunset time is for an idealised flat horizon at a single point. Real cities are not flat. Two friends in the same city can watch the sun set 18 minutes apart.
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How Daylight Saving Time Wrecks Your Shoot Plan (And the Workaround)
DST is a clock change, not a sun change. The sun keeps doing exactly what it was doing. The problem is that everything in your calendar is wrong by an hour.
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Solar Noon and Why Outdoor Portraits Look Terrible Then
Shooting portraits outdoors at solar noon is one of the most common rookie mistakes. The reasons are simple geometry, and the workarounds are equally simple.
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Wedding Ceremony Timing for Natural Light
If the venue is outdoor and the budget did not include a lighting kit, ceremony start time is the single most important photo decision. Pick wrong and the album is ugly.
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Plants and Seasonal Sun: a Quick Gardener's Guide
"Full sun" on a seed packet means six hours of direct light in midsummer. That number is a lie six months of the year. Here is how to read your garden's actual sun pattern.
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Sunrise Meditation: Choosing Your Window
If you have decided to meditate at sunrise, the next question is which sunrise. The forty minutes around dawn contain three very different windows, each with a different feel.
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Photographing the Northern Lights: When to Look
Aurora photography is mostly a planning problem disguised as a photography problem. Get the timing right and the rest is straightforward.
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Best Times for Landscape Photography by Season
Golden hour shifts more across the seasons than across the day. Here is what each season actually does to the light, and why it changes how you shoot.
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Astrophotography Planning With Civil, Nautical and Astronomical Twilight
The three twilights are not bureaucratic labels — they tell you when astronomers can actually see stars. Here is how to use them to plan a night under the sky.
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Need exact times for tonight's shoot? Open the sun calculator or browse 219 ready-made city pages.