The Magic Hour by Larry Brownstein
Getting Light Just Right

Photography is a magical medium. I can still remember the wonder of seeing, for the first time, a print develop before my eyes in the darkroom—pure magic. The cliché decisive moment, often attributed to the photographic style of the late Henri Cartier-Bresson, is probably better described as the magical moment when beautiful light, interesting gesture, and artistic vision converge to create a great photograph. As if simply capturing light on film wasn’t magical enough, now we have the computer to create magical worlds.

For me one of the most exciting techniques available to a photographer is shooting at the magic hour—just before the sunrise, and just after the sunset. It is this time that often provides the sweetest light for a photographer. The warm glows of this time of day provide the best opportunity to photograph the natural landscape. It is also an interesting time to do outdoor portraiture. But to me the magic hour is the best time to photograph the city, the streets and all the artificial light sources. It is at this time that the photographer can balance natural light with artificial light and create surprising compositions.

What is equally magical is the marketability of photographs done at this time of day. One of my most commercially successful images was taken in Times Square at dusk. The electronic signs, neon signs, streaking taillights and headlights with a bit of color in the sky made for a dynamic image, capturing an important aspect of the city.

Shooting at the magic hour can be simple in the case of a sunset, or silhouette picture. However, assuring proper exposure is more complicated when shooting an image such as a city skyline because of the necessity of balancing natural and man-made light sources. But it is easily learned nonetheless. I’ll examine in detail how to determine exposure and discuss filters as well.

Sunsets are easy to expose for. Just meter the sky to ensure a good exposure. Silhouettes are almost as easy. You still need to expose for the sky. If you are using an in-camera meter, you may have to zoom in on the sky around the silhouetted object to get an exposure reading, set the camera in the manual exposure mode, and then re-compose with the silhouetted object in the frame.

When shooting an image such as a city skyline, the trick is to balance the ambient and artificial light. When this balancing act is achieved, you can have beautiful twilight color in the sky along with streets and buildings illuminated with man-made light. Performing this balancing act is simply a matter of waiting. In the morning you will be waiting for the natural illumination to increase to match the intensity of the man-made lights. In the evening, you’ll be waiting for the natural light to dim enough to be of about the same intensity as the man-made lights. “Magic hour” may be a misnomer when it comes to shooting these twilight skylines and vibrant street scenes. In my experience there is only a 15-minute window of opportunity when the ambient and artificial light are within an f-stop (or two at the most) of each other, allowing for a good image. Of course, slide film and digital are less forgiving than negative film (less exposure latitude), so you’ll have to be more precise in determining the right time to shoot.

To determine the right time to shoot you can simply use the in-camera meter and meter the sky and then meter the rest of the scene and compare. (Some cameras won’t display meter readings of longer than one second or eight seconds, depending upon the camera. You can get around this by setting your aperture to its widest setting. Then if you want a smaller aperture you can simply set an equivalent exposure. If you meter one second at f/2.8 you can use an equivalent exposure of 32 seconds at f/16.) You can also use a hand-held meter. I generally use the squint trick before using a meter. By squinting I find I am able to eliminate many details from a scene and can more easily gauge the relative intensities of different areas in a scene. If I squint and the street goes completely dark while the sky is still bright I know I still have to wait for the natural light to dim. However, if I squint and the sky goes dark while the streets are bright I know that I have missed my window (assuming I am shooting in the evening). I often rely solely upon the squint method. Sometimes I also meter with the camera to make sure.

Also related to exposure is the phenomenon of reciprocity failure. Film is primarily designed to be used at high shutter speeds. The shutter speeds associated with magic hour are more likely to range from 10 seconds to two minutes, depending upon apertures, filters, etc. Film is less sensitive to low intensities of light during long exposures as compared to high intensities during short exposures. In other words, you can no longer blindly trust your camera’s meter when it comes to long exposures. This sounds ghastly—how can you get a good exposure if you can’t trust your camera’s meter? But the good news is that reciprocity failure is predictable and easily accounted for. Whenever my exposures go above five seconds, I begin to compensate by overexposing the film. At five seconds I overexpose by 1⁄3 f-stop. At 20-second exposures I begin to compensate with a 1⁄2 f-stop overexposure. For a minute exposure I compensate as much as 2⁄3 of an f-stop. And, since this is not an exact science, I always bracket on both sides of the determined exposure. You can get away without these adjustments if you are using negative film, but your negative won’t be optimal. If you shoot slides you will absolutely need to account for reciprocity failure!

Now that you know how to meter and account for reciprocity failure, you may find the following rule-of-thumb useful as a guideline to assure you are in the right ballpark with your exposure. When shooting a skyline during the sweetest light of magic hour using 50 ISO film and an aperture of f/16, your exposure will be about one minute long. If you are using different ISO films, apertures or adding filters, you will have to account for that when you shoot in order to have a guideline, or a sanity check, for your exposures.

Sometimes a flash can assist in the exposure balancing act. Of course, flash is not useful for a city skyline. But if there is a nearby object, such as a statue, that is not sufficiently lit, you can take care of this with flash. Or perhaps you want a person in the foreground, but you don’t want the person silhouetted—this is when you will need the flash. Using flash in this way is easy with the more modern cameras, especially those using Matrix-balanced fill-flash, where you can simply dial in the flash exposure to ambient exposure lighting ratio and the camera/flash system does the rest!

I find that magic hour is when I use filters. While during the rest of the day I rely solely upon an occasional warming filter or a polarizer, during the magic hour I have an array of over a dozen filters that I use. I use these special effects filters from Cokin: Dreams, Softstar, Diffuser, Pastel, and Gradual Grey. I also use color compensating filters from Hitech: 15cc Blue, 20cc Magenta. The Cokins and the Hitechs are rectangular filters that slide into a holder, which screw into the front of your lens. I have both the Cokin and Hitechs holders. The Hitech holder is much more expensive, but it allows me to use my workhorse 20mm lens without vignetting (the corners of the image seeing the filter holder and turning black). The 20mm Magenta is by far my favorite filter. It adds a nice tint to a twilight blue sky and eliminates the green cast from much street lighting. The Cokin Dreams filter is the wildest filter that I use. It casts strange reflections from the highlights in the scene. The graduated filters, which are dark on one side and light on the other, can be used to balance the light too. For example, if you are metering and the sky is still too bright to shoot, you can bring down the brightness by placing the dark part of the graduated filter over the sky. The graduated filters come in a variety of colors, but I recommend the neutral grey. These filters also come in a variety of f-stops ranging from one to three f-stops of darkening. If you want to buy just one, I recommend the two-f-stop neutral density filter. If you find that you are collecting many of the rectangular filters, you should buy a filter case such as that made by Tamrac, which holds eight filters.

Certainly, at these long exposures you’ll need a good tripod. I love my Gitzo Mountaineer tripod because it is light and sturdy and easy to set up. I use the Stroboframe quick release system to allow fast set-up—I just click the camera in place.

At the magic hour the headlights and taillights of cars become colorful curves winding through your composition. Small apertures will turn streetlights into starbursts because of the diffraction effect. Reciprocity failure will shift the color of your scene in surprisingly interesting ways. Fill-flash can highlight a dramatic foreground element. And a beautiful twilight glow in the sky can bring the magical moment all together to create an exciting photograph!
Though I no longer experience the thrill of seeing a print develop before my eyes in the darkroom, I still enjoy the anticipation of getting my slides back from the photo lab and seeing how many magical moments—some of which are several minutes long—I have captured on film.

Larry Brownstein is author and photographer of Los Angeles: Where Anything is Possible, an inspirational look at life, culture and architecture in L.A. He is represented by Getty Images, California Stock and other photo agencies. His work includes travel, landscape, portraiture and wedding photography. His web site is www.larrybrownstein.com. He can be reached at (310) 815-1402, larryb@larrybrownstein.com/.