Golden Light

It's often said that one should time their photography to very early morning, or late in the evening, when the sun is just setting. Those times are called the hours of golden light, because when the sun shines from such a low angle, it gives the photos a lovely light. It usually compliments skintones beautifully, requires very little post-production (mostly more contrast, the photos might look a bit flat right out of the camera) and allows a wide range of manual settings. Since the light isn't too stark, you don't have to use the fastest shutter speed even in direct light, and even the shade has enough light to make good photos.



The above photo was taken of Hippu during this golden light, in shade with settings ISO 400, f/2.0, 1/640. I maybe should have slowed the shutter speed a bit more to lower the ISO to 200, but there wasn't too much grain with this one. The main thing is, that even when I was in total shade, it still looks like there's a nice diffused light shining on him. I did enhance his eyes a bit with PS (as well as adding more depth to midtones with levels and adding a low-opacity orangy fill layer with overlay blending mode to give the colouring even more warmth).

I was also very happy to see that all of the pictures I took of this pose were sharp enough to see separate eyelashes. It has to do with the speedy shutter, but I'm giving some credit to the good lighting as well :)

I got other good photos as well in this shoot, one of which is going to wait until Sunday and the challenge photo-post! And since I'm so happy with the results of the evening light, I'll have more incentive to go out more with my dolls, to get more lovely photos of them. I've been so stuck on taking photos indoors, with the same white background, it's refreshing to get some greens in there. And there's so much more variation out there, than on my bed XD