Blue hour and night photography
Be there when the sky goes blue
Have you ever found the right street, the right bridge, and then stood there in full dark? Blue hour is the short window after sunset and before sunrise when the sky turns deep blue and the city lights are already on. This site calculates that window for a real place and a real date, in local time.
Your Blue Hour
Blue hour at Budapest, Hungary
Timezone: Europe/Budapest (UTC+02:00)
- Morning blue hour
- 05:30–05:55
- Evening blue hour
- 19:30–19:55
- Sunrise
- 06:14
- Sunset
- 19:11
Blue hour is when the Sun is between 4° and 8° below the horizon. Morning ends before sunrise. Evening starts after sunset.
Not a round hour. Type a city from the list. It works without a network. If the name is obscure, keep typing.
If you want the how, start with what blue hour is, then how to shoot it. The Flickr group is still there if you want to look at other people’s frames.
Blue hour in cities
All cities- Blue hour in Budapest Parliament, the Chain Bridge and the river — this is the city the calculator was built around.
- Blue hour in Istanbul Mosques, the water, and a city that is already lit when the sky turns.
- Blue hour in London Thames light, wet pavement, and a sky that goes blue even when the day was grey.
- Blue hour in New York Manhattan from the water, and streets that are already as bright as the sky.
- Blue hour in Paris The Seine, the bridges, and stone that takes the blue without fuss.
- Blue hour in Prague Charles Bridge, the castle ridge, and streetlamps that were made for this colour.
- Blue hour in Reykjavik A capital where summer barely gets dark and winter blue hour is a brief, useful band.
- Blue hour in San Francisco The Gate, the Bay, and fog that can help or erase the sky.
- Blue hour in Tokyo Towers, river, and neon that already matches a deep sky.
- Blue hour in Venice Water, stone, and almost no cars — a tripod city if there ever was one.
Articles
All articles- How to develop blue hour photos Calibrate the screen, then fix brightness and white balance before you touch anything clever.
- How to plan a blue hour shoot Pick the date for the light you want, then work backwards from the calculator so you are not still walking at the wrong minute.
- How to shoot blue hour Timing, exposure, white balance, a tripod, and weather — the actual checklist I use.
- Stuck and dead pixels on a Canon DSLR A bright white spec in a long exposure is often a stuck pixel. Canon has a menu trick that mapped it out on my 40D.
- What blue hour is (morning vs evening) The short window when the sky goes deep blue — twice a day, and not the same picture both times.