Blue Hour Photos

As I was perusing blog land yesterday, I discovered a new term that looked fascinating.  It’s called the “blue hour” of photography – a “sweet spot” of time when the sky turns a brilliant blue when taking night photos.  It’s invisible to the naked eye, but looks incredible in pictures.  I was directed to a site called www.bluehoursite.com and found out the blue hour for my area of the world last night was between 8:14-8:40 p.m.  I decided to give it a whirl…

I set up a little scene on my kitchen table.  In order for this to work, you need to have some light of some sort.  I used three candles.  Here’s what it looked like at about 7 p.m.

blue hour before

Here’s what it looked like after 8:15…

blue hour tablescape

Isn’t that amazing how blue the sky and water is?  I’m not gonna lie, though.  I took a lot of pictures before I got this one!  I couldn’t quite figure out how to get the candles light enough with the sky blue behind…  The flash pictures got pretty interesting…

glare reflection

No matter how I tried to diffuse that flash, my reflection showed in the window. Nope, that wasn’t the look I was going for…

Eventually, I moved the photo shoot outside where no sliding glass doors got in the way…

candles on deck

And this ended up being my favourite shot.  (#66 – taken at 8:39 p.m.!!Smile)

{Picture taken with tripod with self-timer set to reduce movement.  Settings were f4.2, 1/1.6s, ISO 200.}

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4 Comments

  1. What a fun post! I am continually learning my dslr camera and I've never heard the phrase blue hour before. Awesome! . . . I'm not sure how I landed on your pretty blog but I'm also a beach cottage girl-my husband and I moved into our beach cottage fixer six months ago and are busy renovating! Small world! God bless, Erin @ Rare&BeautifulTreasures

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