Blue Hour? I've been taking pictures for a long time, and I learned something new during the Summer of 2015.
The last stop on our Disney Cruise that started in Copenhagen, ended in the port of Dover. From there we spent a few nights in London. As part of my stay in London, I decided that I had to get the requisite shots of Big Ben and Parliament and I thought I wanted some type of sunset shot because they are just more interesting.
While you’ve most likely heard of the golden hours – that time right after sunrise or before sunset where the outdoors turn into a golden paradise.
Close to sunset, I get my gear and head over to the bridge to scout out the composition I want. I finally find this location on the bridge. I see this other photographer there, turns out to be a guy from France, and I asked him how orange the sky gets at sunset. Maybe because I am color blind, but all my life, I associate sunsets with orange, and once I get a picture of the sunset and the sun goes below the horizon, I always pack up and walk away.
He gets this odd look on his face and says, "no it doesn't turn orange, it turns blue". That was a little hard for me to process, I figured what the hell. He further explained that for about 15 minutes after the sun goes down is when it gets blue. This conversation was at about 9:30pm and you can see on Big Ben that I got this shot at 10pm.
Later I looked up Blue Hour on the Internet and found this description:
"The blue hour is the period of twilight each morning and evening when the sun is a significant distance below the horizon and the residual, indirect sunlight takes on a predominantly blue hue. It lasts about 35-40 minutes."
Thank you anonymous French photographer for teaching me something new and letting me know to stick around long enough to get this shot.
The technical aspect of this shot was fairly simple. This was another HDR shot with the normal exposure set to f/4.5, 1/20 sec, ISO 3200 at a 33mm focal length. I later merged the three bracketed images in Lightroom and did tone mapping and other post processing.
Have fun capturing the magic of Disney.