For years, photographers have understood that creating the best possible photo means shooting in the best possible light. For those who shoot with natural light, the best light often comes at what is known as the golden hour. This happens when the sun goes down and the angle of the sun relative to the earth causes light to pass through the clouds and air pollution produces soft, diffused light. The color of this light is warm and looks good on all skin tones.
Golden hour also occurs at sunrise, but from my point of view, the period when the best light hits the subject is very short and the light becomes harsh and deteriorates very quickly. For those times when you can’t plan to shoot around the golden hour, it would be helpful to be able to emulate the look and feel of this soft and warm light. Shooting during the artificial golden hour has the added advantage of allowing you to shoot for as long as you like. The natural occurrence did not last an actual hour.
In this video, photographer Simone Ferretti shows her process of artificially creating golden hour light. He uses a Nanlite Forza 60B . Dual Color Monolight LED Kit along with some everyday objects that act as gobos. One interesting thing about Simone’s video is that it doesn’t follow the time-wasting format of starting with an intro followed by a compelling reel, followed by a second intro, then a call-out. call please like and subscribe . Instead, there’s a brief commercial touting some Lightroom presets, and the tutorial starts at a very reasonable 25 seconds.
