When you start out as a photographer, it’s easy to underestimate the effect that natural light or sun light has on your pictures. There are so many decisions to make, compositions to test, and settings to try, that sunlight becomes almost an afterthought – except for sunset pictures, of course. But as you’re growing more experienced, you’ll find that natural light really is one of the most important elements of a great picture! Read on to learn why, and how you can use that knowledge to take beautifully lit pictures at all times of the day.

Sun light changes a lot during the day. To make things easier, photographers divide the day into five different phases: Daylight, Golden Hour, Sunset / Sunrise, Blue Hour, and Night. On a typical day, daylight takes up most of the hours around noon. The golden hour begins one or two hours before sunset (this can be a bit shorter or longer, depending on your location). After sunset, while the sky is still bright enough, we have the blue hour (or civil, nautical, and astronomical dawn). The real “night”, in photographer’s terms, only really happens when the sun is far below the horizon, and the sky is completely dark.

Alright! Enough with the dry theory. Let’s look at each phase and see what you can do to take the perfect picture with the available light.

Daylight

Daylight. Most of the day, when the sun is high on the sky, its light is bright and harsh. On sunny days (or when the sun peeks through clouds), shadows are very sharp. Often, your scene has a lot of contrast, which can bring issues with the dynamic range of your camera.

The Golden Hour. Towards the evening, the sun sits lower on the sky. Shadows get longer, and often have less contrast. Because the light has to travel through the atmosphere, it often appears warmer (more orange), which can lead to very beautiful, dreamy shots. Contrast is lower and easier to manage.

Sunset. With beautiful, colorful light, and a lot of contrast, sunset is a really great time to take photos. Shadows are long, and you can often use them in your composition. But, sunsets are also challenging! If the sun is part of your shot, you need to expose correctly to get a good balance between details in the highlights and dark shadows.

After Sunset: The Blue Hour. Shortly after sunset, when the last traces of direct, orange sunlight are gone, the sky takes on a light blue color. This is a great time for city scenes! You can really focus on street lights, buildings or reflections, like in this scene in Hamburg.

A lot of “night” pictures are really photographed in the blue hour, especially later, during nautical or astronomical dawn. At this time, the sky is dark enough to bring out stars, but still has a rich deep color to it.

The blue hour is often divided into three phases:

• Civil dawn happens directly after sunset. At civil dawn, the sky is almost as bright as during the day, but it turns bluer. The last sun rays often light up clouds with yellow or orange tones. The light is beautifully soft, and still bright enough photograph without a tripod. The first stars and planets start to be visible in this time. Civil dawn ends when the sun is more than six degrees below the horizon.
• Nautical dawn occurs directly after, while the sun is between six and 12 degrees below the horizon. During nautical dawn, more stars and constellations appear. While you will often need a tripod (depending on your camera), you can take gorgeous photos with the dark blue sky as a background. Nautical dawn is a great time for night photos, because there’s still enough brightness to light up your subjects and the foreground.
• Astronomical dawn is the last phase before true night. The sun is between 12 and 18 degrees below the horizon. Many more stars become visible at this time, but the sky still has a little bit of blue brightness left to it. At sea or on the coast, the horizon between sky and the sea is no longer clearly visible. After the sun is more than 18 degrees below the horizon, astronomical dawn ends, and the night begins. Above around 48 degrees of latitude (so, to the north of Paris or Vancouver), this actually doesn’t happen during summer! In these places, astronomical dawn transitions directly into astronomical dusk, with no night phase in between. (Even higher north, the same is actually true for nautical and civil dawn.)

Night. When the sun sinks further below the horizon, the blue sky slowly becomes black, and even more stars become visible. With long exposures (but beware of star trails and light pollution), you can capture the tiniest hint of blue that’s still there in the sky.