Shooting Portraits in Golden Hour Light

This post was originally published in September 2018 and is part of the legacy archive migration.

Golden hour earns its name. That 20-30 minute window before sunset gives you directional light, warm tones, and shadows that work with a face instead of against it. Most of my outdoor portrait work happens in that stretch, partly because of the light itself and partly because it forces discipline — you have to be set up and ready before it hits, which means you stop wasting the session on logistics.

The positioning question is the main thing people get wrong. A lot of photographers put the sun directly behind them, thinking it’ll light the subject evenly. It does, but it also flattens everything and usually makes your subject squint. Better options: face them away from the sun and use the sky as a large, soft fill source, or put the sun just off to one side for a split-light look. Both give you dimension that a frontal setup doesn’t.

I typically shoot with a 50mm or 85mm prime wide open (f/1.8 or f/2) during golden hour. The shallow depth of field separates the subject from whatever’s behind them, and the longer focal length on the 85 compresses the background in a way that makes warm bokeh look good without trying. Expose for the face, not the background — you’ll blow out the sky sometimes, but that’s fine. A silhouetted, properly exposed background with a dark face is not fine.

One practical note: bring a reflector if you have one. Even a cheap 5-in-1 reflector bouncing some of that golden light back onto a shadowed side of the face makes a noticeable difference. I started keeping a small collapsible one in my bag after I kept wishing I had it on location.