I love shooting with natural light, especially during golden hours. In fact, I aim to shoot using only natural light whenever possible, and only when necessary will I enhance it with additional light sources to help enhance the look to avoid losing the organic beauty I’m after. This bias inevitably leads me to always shoot during the golden hour, as this time of day offers some of the best natural light effects if done right.
Golden hour (or magic hour) is of course the time before sunset, but can also refer to the time starting directly after sunrise. The sun emits incredibly beautiful, warm and forgiving light at this time of day, with a unique appearance that cannot be replicated. Filmmakers like Terrence Malick have made a career out of shooting at sunset, and many others continue to follow suit because its unique characteristics are irresistible.
But shooting during prime time isn’t always easy, and many filmmakers are completely unprepared when shooting during prime time. There is a common misconception that filming at this time of day is easy, mainly because there is less equipment involved compared to typical indoor or nighttime outdoor scenes. That said, just because there aren’t as many lights, C-stands, or flags on set, it doesn’t mean you don’t have a job to do. In fact, despite what it may seem on the surface, shooting during golden hour can be a lot more complicated than shooting under more controlled lighting conditions.
Over the years, I’ve shot prime time time and time again, developing guidelines that I’m always familiar with on set.
Here are the 5 most common mistakes you can make when shooting during prime time, and how to avoid them:
1. Underestimating shooting time
Prime time doesn’t always last an hour. Depending on your location, the time of year, and many other variables, the actual filming time during prime time may be only 40 minutes or less. Filmmakers often wait until the last second to start shooting, trying to capture the best quality of light… but when the sun goes down, they realize that only half of the scene was captured, and unfortunately, there is no solution other than to reshoot .
The key to timing your shoot correctly is simple: invest in pre-production. Scout your locations, know the exact times you can shoot, rehearse your actors like crazy, block in advance and more. The more legwork you do up front and the more decisions you make before you start rolling, the more time you have to actually shoot your footage. During prime time, if you spend 5 minutes formatting a card, or re-blocking a scene because you’re not ready, every second counts. You just lost another opportunity.
2. Inconsistent exposure
Under controlled lighting conditions, you can set the exposure in the camera and keep it exactly the same for the duration of the scene. However, you never have this luxury when shooting in any type of natural light, as you’re always chasing the movement of the sun. This problem is greatly exaggerated during golden hours because light can literally change every second.
So if you don’t change your exposure settings frequently (whether by opening the aperture, raising the ISO, or adjusting the ND filter), your image will be all over the place, at least in terms of exposure. Your light levels will be drastically different from your first shot to your last. This means you need to rely on a lot of color correction work to match the footage, which of course consumes a lot of unnecessary time and money later in the project.
This may feel like an obvious point, but I can tell you from first-hand experience as a colorist that this is a problem I see more often than anything else in my color kits. So always remember to pay close attention to your light meter, histogram, or whatever exposure tool you choose, and keep adjusting your camera settings to capture consistent, well-exposed sequences.
3. Missing out on early prime time
Anyone who has photographed during the golden hour many times knows that the light quality at this time of day can change significantly due to cloud cover and other environmental variables. One night’s sunset might illuminate the clouds in the sky in pinks and purples, while the next night there might be no clouds in the sky at all – ultimately giving you a softer look.
In more extreme cases, when there is significant cloud cover, golden hour is virtually non-existent. If there isn’t enough room in the clouds for light to shine through, the hour before sunset can look just like the rest of the day – monotonous and dreary.
This can cause a lot of problems, especially if you plan to start shooting at a specific time. Let’s say sunset is at 7pm and you want to start rolling at 6pm. By about 6pm the light may actually look worse than it was at 5pm because not only is there still cloud cover, but it’s now much darker meaning you’re now also battling lower light levels .
In this case, all you can do is start shooting as early as possible. For example, if you start shooting at 4pm, you’ll have at least a few hours of good light before it gets too dark (even if you don’t see the sunset). You might even get lucky and find that the clouds start to lift at the perfect time…no way of knowing. Most importantly, when in doubt – start shooting. Prime time isn’t guaranteed, so sometimes you just have to be willing to work with what you’ve got.
4. Photograph the Blue Hour
The blue hour is a short period of time after sunset (usually 20 – 40 minutes) when the sun has completely disappeared, but some ambient light remains. This is another incredible time of day to shoot, but it’s more challenging than golden hour because the time window is so small and the exposure levels are so low.
Some filmmakers will continue to drag scenes into the blue hour (beginning with prime time), which can ultimately cause a lot of problems, especially when shooting heavy coverage. For example, let’s say you want to capture a close-up of one actor during golden hour, and then capture a second close-up of another actor during blue hour. When shooting, this doesn’t seem to be a problem at all, as you can expose both photos correctly in camera. But this situation can be extremely problematic for matching colors later in the editing suite.
Obviously, in any color grading software, you can color balance to match talent’s skin tones, and use curves or color keys to address specific issues with overall color balance. But you’ll never make the sky look the same. Lifting the sky in post will never look right, and while it’s possible to go down this route, a better approach is to get it right in camera.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t shoot during the blue hour – it’s just that you should never assume you can match blue hour footage with golden hour footage, because sometimes they are too far apart and the appearance of the scene can become blurry. Distract the audience’s attention. Always aim to complete the scene before blue time, unless the scene is intended to last into the evening, which is the look you want.
5. Late oversaturation
Not all primetime problems happen on set. Some may also occur in color kits. Filmmakers often want to make the most of golden hour footage when color grading, and in an effort to achieve the typical “sunset look,” they often end up pushing the colors too far. Some filmmakers are tempted to add more oranges and yellows to the midtones and significantly increase the saturation to make the golden hour effect more pronounced. But unfortunately, this type of color work is counterintuitive to the ideal golden hour look, as it can completely take away the natural feel of any given scene.
Golden Hour is all about capturing that magical and authentic quality of light that feels beautiful in an organic way. Once your image is noticeably “tinted”, you’ve lost the entire essence of why golden hour footage looks so beautiful. Your footage becomes composited and digital, which completely defeats the purpose of shooting during prime time in the first place.
Keeping saturation and color balance natural is one of the most powerful ways to create the look of a shot shot at sunset. The goal should be to let the natural colors shine through and play up the organic beauty of how the environment actually looks, rather than making it look like a Michael Bay movie. That’s not to say that you can’t stylize your footage, or give it a unique look… but that you should be tasteful and subtle in your shading methods to maintain the impeccable quality of the light captured at the light source .
That’s it for now.
Hopefully those of you who love shooting during prime time as much as I did learned something here, and I’ll see you there next time!
