Leveraging the golden hour !

The golden hour….

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. 

The period of time right before sunrise and shortly after sunset is called the "magic hour" . During this time the brightness of the sky matches the brightness of streetlights, signs, car headlights and lit windows. Also, during this period of time there are no sharp shadows because the sun is set (or is not risen). The magic hour is actually closer to twenty or thirty minutes.

And I targeted exactly this time last Sunday to go to Harajuku and look for the perfect angle to catch the sun, its light reflection and work on the emotions that could be leveraged through that.

As you can imagine one of the biggest complexity in this district at this time is to isolate the subject. And for that I used here my bicycle and a low angle. On of the result could have been this one :

As you can see here I leverage the bicycle tyre to isolate the 2 subjects and focus on them to have them perfectly clear and sharp. I also used a bit of a post touch of the colour to make sure that they catch more the eyes that their environment.

Definitely this picture works as well and it is quite soft and cute.

That said I wanted to convey a bit more of darkness in line with this dark tyre, I wanted to be less explicit and trigger more imagination for my viewer. That’s where I could spot this girl passing with her white skirt and decided to make the focus on the bicycle and have her blurred. For me it was much more enigmatic… Looking at this first picture you’ve got this feeling of her passing there for one second and even want to know where will she go, what was she doing here.

As photography is there to trigger questioning and emotion, sometimes sharpness is not your best ally…

What’s your feeling on this ? Do you prefer the first or the second picture ? How would you take this shot and how do you use golden hour ?

Here the lens quality play a huge role. Indeed because of the big aperture of this lens I was able to have a high shutter speed keeping my ISO at 100.

Through that you are able to have a super strong blur because of the depth of field but not a motion blur from the subject that would definitely kill this picture. All that with a perfect balance of light that I voluntary kept low in post.