Golden Hour

Golden Hour Calculator: Find Today’s Best Light for Photography

Golden hour is the stretch of soft, warm light right after sunrise and right before sunset — the window photographers, filmmakers, and anyone chasing a good photo build their whole day around. Below, enter your location (or use your device location) to get today’s calculated golden hour and blue hour times, down to the minute.

Today’s golden hour falls in the hour or so surrounding sunrise and sunset for your location. Enter a city below or use your device location to calculate times for today’s date.

What Is Golden Hour, Exactly?

Golden hour is the period around sunrise and sunset when the sun sits low on the horizon. When the sun is low, its light travels a longer path through Earth’s atmosphere, increasing scattering and absorption of shorter wavelengths, which shifts direct sunlight toward warmer reds, oranges, and yellows. The result is generally softer, more directional light with long shadows and less of the harsh overhead contrast associated with midday sun.

There’s no single universal definition of golden hour’s exact boundaries — this calculator defines golden hour as the period when the sun is between 6° above the horizon and 4° below it, extending slightly past sunrise/sunset on both ends rather than cutting off exactly at the horizon.

Despite the name, golden hour isn’t always a full 60 minutes. Near the equator, the sun generally crosses the horizon at a relatively steep angle, so golden hour tends to be markedly shorter than at higher latitudes. Closer to the poles, where the sun’s path is shallower, it can stretch well past an hour — see the table below for rough examples.

Golden Hour vs. Blue Hour

These two get confused constantly, but they sit on opposite sides of sunrise and sunset:

• Golden hour (sun roughly +6° to −4°) happens while the sun is at or near the horizon, giving warm, directional light with visible shadows.
• Blue hour (sun roughly −4° to −6°) occurs around sunrise and sunset while the sun is below the horizon, when only indirect, scattered light remains — cooler, softer, and much lower in contrast, with a blue cast to the sky. It isn’t necessarily shadowless; shadows from buildings or other light sources can still show up.

In the evening, the order is golden hour, then sunset, then blue hour. In the morning it runs the other way: blue hour, then golden hour (starting just before sunrise), then full daylight. The calculator above shows both, since most photographers plan around the full sequence rather than just one window.

Starting Camera Settings for Golden Hour

Golden hour’s low, warm light needs different handling than midday sun. The chart below gives example starting points, not exposure rules — choose shutter speed based on subject movement and camera stability, aperture based on desired depth of field, and ISO based on the available light in front of you.

Shooting in RAW gives the most latitude to fine-tune white balance and recover shadow/highlight detail after the fact — worth doing during golden hour specifically, since the dynamic range between a bright sky and a shaded foreground is often wider than the camera can capture perfectly in-camera.

Golden Hour Photography Tips

Backlighting and rim light. Position your subject between you and the sun to get a glowing rim of light around hair, fur, or foliage edges. Slightly underexposing (by about 1 stop) keeps that rim light from blowing out.

Front-lit portraits. Putting the sun behind you lights your subject’s face directly and can give warm, even skin tones — but direct low-angle sun can also cause squinting and uneven shadows. Open shade, or turning your subject slightly so the light rakes across rather than hits them head-on, is often more reliable.

Controlling flare. Shooting toward a low sun invites lens flare and reduced contrast. A lens hood helps, but so does simply blocking direct sun from hitting the front element with your hand, a hat, or another person, just out of frame.

Silhouettes. Meter for the bright sky rather than your subject, and stop down (f/11–f/16) to keep the subject a clean, dark shape. Simple, recognizable outlines — a person, a tree, a mountain ridge — read best as silhouettes; busy or overlapping shapes turn to mush.

Landscapes. A tripod pays off here — smaller apertures for depth of field mean slower shutter speeds, especially as the light fades through the last few minutes. Graduated ND filters (or exposure blending in post) help balance a bright sky against a darker foreground.

Video and film. Golden hour’s shifting color temperature means locking white balance manually rather than leaving it on auto, or your footage will visibly shift color mid-shot as the camera re-adjusts.

How Golden Hour Length Changes by Latitude and Season

Golden hour isn’t a fixed 60 minutes anywhere on Earth. Its length depends on how steeply the sun drops toward the horizon, which is influenced by both latitude and season. The table below gives approximate examples only — actual duration varies substantially with season and location even within the same latitude band, so use the calculator above for your specific location and date.

At high latitudes, especially in summer, low-angle sunlight can persist for hours as the sun skims the horizon rather than dropping straight down — though at some point this shades into prolonged twilight rather than a distinct “golden hour.”

How This Calculator Works

The times above come from SunCalc, an astronomical positioning library that calculates the sun’s angle relative to the horizon for a given date, latitude, and longitude. Times are shown in the searched location’s local timezone, looked up automatically from its coordinates. Golden hour and blue hour follow a common photography convention based on solar angle:

• Golden hour runs while the sun’s center is between 6° above the horizon and 4° below it, the range where light passes through enough atmosphere to shift warm without losing brightness.
• Blue hour runs while the sun is between roughly 4° and 6° below the horizon, when the sky still holds ambient light but the sun itself is out of view. (This is narrower than nautical twilight, which extends to 12° below the horizon.)

Because these are angle-based, not clock-based, the minute-by-minute timing shifts every day of the year and varies by location — which is why a live calculator is more useful than a fixed rule of thumb like “an hour before sunset.”

Note for locations near the Arctic or Antarctic Circle: on some dates the sun may not cross one or more of these thresholds at all (polar day or polar night). When that happens the calculator will show –:– for that event rather than an invalid time.

Golden Hour for Photography vs. Videography

Photographers and videographers tend to use the window differently:

• Photographers may especially value the final portion of golden hour, when the sun is very low and the light becomes softer and more directional — though this is a preference, not a rule.
• Videographers and filmmakers often need to plan carefully around the changing light, since exposure and color temperature can shift noticeably over the course of a shot list or interview setup — closer to what “magic hour” originally referred to on film sets, though the term itself isn’t strictly standardized.

Either way, arriving with your gear already set up before golden hour starts matters more than the total length of the window — the light shifts fast, especially in the closing minutes.

Frequently Asked Questions