Golden hour

Factory lights, originally uploaded by uw-eric.

About an hour before and after sunset (and probably sunrise as well) it is said that the light is showing remarkable properties. Everything seems to light up in beautiful reddish colours. This is also known as the golden hour.

So I went with a friend of mine to the maasvlakte and tried it out. Before this shot, shooting pictures during the golden hour was coincidental - but now I was paying attention. And this is what happened:

First the colours seem to fade away as the light started to get weaker. Pictures I took then look dull, with almost no saturation. But there is a small period in time (about 10 minutes) where the sky and the artificial lights are producing the same amount of light. I waited for that moment and while there were still details in the sky, the artificial lights exploded into fantastic colours. This picture is not photoshopped: the sky is a gorgeous deep blue (there were no clouds), the shiny metal of the factory gets a reddish, almost copper or golden look and the lights are not overexposed - just.

If you want to read more about this, Ken Rockwell claims to shoot most - if not all- of his pictures during golden hour and gets really crazy results!