When is golden hour where you are?
The light that makes exteriors and portraits look expensive lasts under an hour, and it moves by a couple of minutes every day. Pick a city or use your own location and get today’s windows, the twilight slot listings are shot in, and the next seven days.
The next seven days
| Date | Sunrise | Golden hour | Sunset | Twilight ends |
|---|
The sun position is worked out in this tab from your coordinates. If you use the location button, the coordinates stay in the page - they are never sent anywhere.
Golden hour, blue hour, twilight - which is which
Golden hour is the stretch when the sun sits between the horizon and roughly 6° above it. The light travels through more atmosphere, which strips the blue out of it and leaves the warm cast everyone is after. Shadows are long and soft instead of short and hard.
Blue hour is the other side of it: the sun is below the horizon but the sky is still lit, evenly and cold. Nothing casts a shadow. It is the only time an interior light and the sky sit at a similar brightness, which is exactly why property photos are taken then.
Civil twilight is the formal name for that window - it ends when the sun reaches 6° below the horizon, which is the figure this tool uses.
The twilight slot is shorter than people plan for
Between sunset and the end of civil twilight you get somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes depending on your latitude and the season - and only the middle of it actually works, once the sky has darkened enough for the windows to read but before it goes black. Near the equator it is closer to 20 minutes; in northern Europe in summer it stretches out. Arrive an hour early, frame and meter in daylight, and shoot the moment it turns.
How accurate this is
The times come from the standard low-precision solar model and land within about a minute of an almanac for the latitudes people actually shoot in. They assume a flat horizon at sea level - a hill, a treeline or a building to the west takes real minutes off the end of your golden hour, and no calculator can see those. Above the Arctic and Antarctic circles the tool says so instead of inventing a sunrise.
If the light will not cooperate
Weather does not care about your slot, and a listing does not wait a week. A daytime exterior can be turned into a twilight shot afterwards - see property exteriors for what that looks like, and the disclosure rules for how to label it so it stays on the right side of the listing guidelines.
No twilight slot free this week?
Phoxel turns a daytime exterior into a twilight shot with the windows lit - labelled as digitally enhanced, the way listing rules ask. From $6.