The blue hour comes from a French expression, l'heure bleue, which refers to the period of twilight each morning and evening where there is neither full daylight nor complete darkness. The time is considered special because of the quality of the light at this time of day. This is the time of day that the camera lens sees the night sky as "blue". And the naked eye cannot see this magic! All you camera buffs out there, go to Bluehoursite.com and check it out. Of course, night skylines rock because for the total effect, you need some light in the picture. But I wanted to try it at home first. When you visit this website, it pinpoints your location and tells you the morning time and the evening time at which this magic appears.
Click here to learn how to take the pictures. You don't need a lot of fancy equipment. If your camera has a "night" mode, you are on your way. If you don't have a tripod. Set the camera on something stable. Use the timer. Take lots of shots. The middle of the magic hour is best.. but you will need to play with your camera to figure out when it reads the blue sky the best. You can tell that the second picture is much more blue than the first.
This was one of the first pictures I took a week ago. I had a few better pictures, but as luck would have it, I wiped off the camera card today :(. I think I see more playing in my future. Now that the site has a newly added option to put in other cities and other dates, I think this will be something fun to try when I'm out of town...I had to try it, you can do it too.
There is a love perfume called L'heure Bleue, as well as one called L' Heure Exquise, based on this time of day!
ReplyDeleteMy grandma called it Cat's Light, and along with the dawn, it is my favorite time of day!