Kevin Thom - Hamilton, Toronto, Ontario Photographer

We’ve been busy preparing for the Birth Your Dreams Exhibition, and everything is going really well. We finished shooting the final image for the exhibition last weekend, and were treated to perfect weather for that shot. All of our prints arrived on time too. Today, we purchased the materials for framing all the prints. It’s going to look amazing when it’s all done.

We’re going to have some nice publicity too. View Magazine is putting us on the cover of the issue that comes out on August 6, just a day before the exhibition opens. Laura and I collaborated with the fantastic hair and makeup artist Sue Upton to create a really fun image for that cover that ties into some of the themes of Birth Your Dreams. Here’s a video we made during that photoshoot.

I was thinking today about the concept of gratitude, and how important it is in creating your own reality. If you’re like me, and you believe that you create your own reality by choosing what deserves your attention, you can see that this concept makes an easy hop over to the world of photography. Photography, after all, is the creation of a specific reality. Although we use the term “photo-realistic,” photography can not capture reality. Even photojournalists will agree that a photo is wholly inadequate to capture the entirety of reality, simply because it is a fragment of time, constrained two-dimensionally within the bounds of its frame. As photographers, we must decide what fragment of time to capture, and how to represent it within that frame.

This is where gratitude comes in. Sometimes things just don’t work out how you might have expected. Perhaps it’s raining, or you forgot to bring the lens you need, or delays force you to shoot at a time of day that’s not ideal. There are a lot of things that can go “wrong.” Sure we could stew about these so-called problems and work ourselves into a negative, distracted fit. But, is that really going to help you get the shot? Believe me, it won’t! Instead, is it possible for you to find ways to use these mishaps to your advantage? Take a look around for things to be grateful about. Maybe the clouds are creating drama in the sky. Maybe the rain has forced people to bring out their colorful umbrellas. Maybe an “unattractive” foreground object can be used to add interest to your composition?

Being grateful is not about being unrealistically optimistic. It is about being powerful enough to decide for yourself what the outcome will be, no matter what external circumstances arise.

Laura Hollick and I created this video yesterday to invite you to our Birth Your Dreams exhibition. The show includes sculptures and costumes by Laura, and narrative photos that we’ve created together. We’ve been working on images for this show for almost two years now, so it should be a good one. I’ll let Laura tell you more about it in the video.

The reception is at the Carnegie Gallery in Dundas on August 7, 2009 at 7pm and it goes until around 9pm. If you’re in this area, please stop by the opening reception. It’s shaping up to be a pretty incredible event. If you can’t make it to the reception, the show runs until the end of August. Drop me a note if you want to swing by any time during the month, and maybe I’ll be able to give you a personal tour of the exhibition. For more info, see the Facebook event.

There’s a secret that most photographers know, and that you should know too if you want to start taking great photos. It’s the secret of “The Golden Hour.”

What is the Golden Hour?

Put simply, it’s that time of day when everything just looks great. During the Golden Hour, you can do no wrong with a camera. People, places and things all look beautiful at this time. Waiting until the Golden Hour can make the difference between a bland photo and a spectacular photo.

When does the Golden Hour occur?

The Golden Hour is not necessarily an hour long. It depends on a lot of things, including where in the world you are, and what time of year it is. It usually begins about an hour or two so before sunset, and lasts until the sun meets the horizon. The sky must be clear or mostly clear for you to experience the Golden Hour. If the sky is cloudy or overcast, you won’t see a Golden Hour. Around here (Southern Ontario, Canada), the Golden Hour is longest and most beautiful in the summer months, from about June until September. After that, it becomes shorter and less effective until the winter months, when we hardly get one at all! So, if you’re living in a similar latitude, take as much advantage of the Golden Hour as you can during the summer. If you’re lucky enough to live near the equator, you will get decent Golden Hour light all year round. If you live in the Arctic or Antarctic, well, you’re going to have to find another way to make your photos great.

Why is the Golden Hour such a great time to shoot?

During mid-day, the sun’s rays penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere perpendicularly, and all of the light gets through. The result is a very harsh form of light that casts sharp and unflattering shadows. Think on-camera flash on a massive scale. Yuck. As the sun descends towards the horizon, its light cuts through the atmosphere at a much flatter angle. This makes the atmosphere work like a giant prism that filters out the blue and ultra-violet end of the spectrum. Cameras hate ultra-violet light, which is why we often put UV filters in front of our lenses. And, because blue has been filtered out, the remaining light takes on a warm and orange glow, reminiscent of romance, adventure, and generally exciting times!

How do I best take advantage of the Golden Hour?

If you’re just making snapshots, the Golden Hour is going to do most of the hard work for you. The light is just better at this time of day, so your photos will look better.

If you want to plan your shot a little more, position yourself so that the sun is coming from behind your subject, towards you. This “backlights” your subject and can produce some really nice rim-lighting effects and interesting shadows. Add to this a couple of human factors–your subject will feel more comfortable not squinting into the sun, and also will enjoy the warmth on their back–and you’re already a long way towards creating emotionally charged portraits. You may have to adjust your camera a bit to compensate for all the extra light it sees by looking into the sun. If you’re using your camera in an automatic or semi-automatic (aperture or shutter-priority modes) look for an EV+/- adjustment, and dial it up to +1 or +2 to ensure that you get some detail in the foreground of your image. If you’re shooting manually, you can just decrease your shutter speed by a couple of stops to get the same effect. Pros will quite often use a reflector or a bit of fill light from an off-camera strobe to gently light the front of the subject.

You can also underexpose your Golden Hour shots, to really pull out the colors of the sunset sky and create dramatic silhouettes of your subjects. Use that same EV+/- adjustment to set a -1 or -2 exposure value. Similarly, you can raise your shutter speed by a couple of stops. The bonus of this is that you can freeze whatever action is happening in front of that golden sunset!

The Eiffel Tower photo above was a bit of a cheat. I actually took that one quite early in the morning, at the “other” Golden Hour. It begins just after sunrise, and goes for an hour or so. It’s quite a bit more difficult to use, though, since you have to get up pretty early to catch it. I left my hotel at 5am to get to that spot in time to take that photo. However, it was the only time I could be assured that the world’s most famous tower would be deserted!

I hope that what you’ll take away from this post is that when you shoot is just as important as what you shoot. Getting consistently great photos takes commitment, skill and discipline, but shooting during the Golden Hour can make the process a whole lot easier. Have fun out there, chasing the gold.

I wrote before about shooting what you love. In this case, it’s my lovely sister Jadine and her new husband David on their wedding day. Here’s my collection of snapshots from their wedding, in video form!

The soundtrack is a song called “Happy” by Secrets in Stereo.