Golden hour portrait photography is the closest thing this craft has to a cheat code. For roughly an hour before sunset, the sun drops low, the light turns warm and directional, and almost every face you point a camera at looks better. Clients ask for this look by name. They send me reference photos bathed in amber light and say, "I want that." After 27 years of shooting portraits in Los Angeles, I can tell you the light is real, but it is not automatic. The photographers who make golden hour look effortless are the ones who planned for it. This guide covers what golden hour actually is, the camera settings that work, seven techniques I use on real sessions, the mistakes that ruin the window, and a behind-the-scenes video of a beach golden hour shoot so you can watch the whole process play out.
In this guide:
- What Is Golden Hour in Photography?
- Why Golden Hour Flatters Every Face
- Golden Hour Camera Settings That Actually Work
- 7 Pro Tips for Golden Hour Portraits
- Posing During Golden Hour
- The 3 Golden Hour Mistakes I See Every Fall
- Watch: Golden Hour Natural Light Photoshoot
- My Golden Hour Rules After 27 Years
- Frequently Asked Questions
What Is Golden Hour in Photography?
What Is Golden Hour in Photography?
Golden hour, sometimes called magic hour, is the period after sunrise and before sunset when the sun sits low enough in the sky to cast soft, warm light. PetaPixel's golden hour guide puts the plain version first: it is about one hour after sunrise and one hour before sunset, when the sun is up but not intense. The technical reason is simple. When the sun is low, its light travels through more of the atmosphere before reaching the ground, which scatters and softens it and shifts it toward gold, orange, and red.
Most photographers mean the pre-sunset window when they say golden hour, though the post-sunrise version offers the same quality of light with far fewer people around. Planning apps like The Photographer's Ephemeris show each day's exact golden hour times for your location, and most of them default golden hour to roughly 40 minutes after sunrise and before sunset.
One more term worth knowing: blue hour. It marks the end of golden hour at sunset, when the light goes blue and purple before the sky turns dark. If you are already on location for golden hour, staying twenty minutes longer for blue hour costs you nothing and often produces the most cinematic frame of the session.
Why Golden Hour Flatters Every Face
Midday sun is a bully. It carves deep shadows under eyes and noses, makes subjects squint, and blows out foreheads. Golden hour does the opposite on every count.
First, the light is directional but soft. Because the sun is low, it rakes across the face instead of pounding down on it, which sculpts cheekbones and jawlines the way a softbox does in the studio. If you want to understand exactly what that low angle is doing to a face, my portrait lighting patterns guide breaks down the six classic patterns, and every one of them behaves more forgivingly in golden hour than under noon sun.
Second, the color flatters skin. Warm amber light is kind to every skin tone in a way that cold midday light never is. This is not a subtle difference. Put the same subject under noon sun and then under golden hour light and the second set looks like it was retouched. It was not. It was just lit well.
Third, the background cooperates. Long shadows, glowing edges of buildings, backlit trees, the sun itself sitting low enough to include in the frame. The environment stops being a problem to manage and starts being a collaborator.
This is why editorial teams chase this window and why clients will rearrange their schedules for it. The light does a meaningful share of the work. Your job is to not waste it.
Golden Hour Camera Settings That Actually Work
Settings are the least romantic part of golden hour and the part most people get wrong. Here is the starting point I use, and the reasoning behind each choice.
Aperture: f/1.8 to f/2.8. For golden hour portraits, a wide aperture turns the warm background into soft, creamy bokeh. SLR Lounge's golden hour guide recommends shooting the majority of a portrait set at f/1.8 or f/2.0, stepping down to f/2.8 only for wider environmental shots where you want more of the scene sharp. I follow the same rule. The dreamy quality of the light already sets a mood, and the wide aperture intensifies it.
Shutter speed: at least 1/250th for people. The light is fading and your instinct will be to slow down. Do not go below what freezes your subject. For a still portrait, 1/250th is my floor. If there is movement, hair in wind, a walking shot, go faster.
ISO: as low as the light allows, then stop worrying. Start at your base ISO and raise it only to hold your shutter speed. Modern sensors are clean far higher than most photographers admit. Noise is a smaller problem than motion blur, every single time.
White balance: set it manually, 6000K to 6500K. This is the setting that separates intentional golden hour work from accidental golden hour work. Auto white balance will often try to neutralize the warmth you showed up for, leaving you with a scene that looks like it was shot at noon. SLR Lounge suggests starting around 6000K to 6500K, roughly the cloudy or shade preset range, and adjusting from there based on what the light actually looks like. Shoot RAW regardless, so you can fine-tune later, but starting close in camera gives you a truer preview and a more useful histogram.
Exposure: expose for the face, protect the highlights. Your meter will lie to you when half the frame is bright sky. In backlit portraits, expose for your subject's face and accept that the sky may blow out slightly, or open up one to one and a half stops from the meter reading. If the sky is the subject, expose for the sky and let the person go dark. Decide which one matters before you press the shutter.
7 Pro Tips for Golden Hour Portraits
7 Pro Tips for Golden Hour Portraits
These are the techniques I actually use on paid sessions, in the order I think about them during a shoot.
1. Arrive Early and Scout the Sun Line
Golden hour gives you roughly 20 to 40 minutes of truly great light, and the best of it is usually the last ten minutes before the sun drops. SLR Lounge's first rule is patience and planning: know what time the sun sets, know exactly where it sets, and know whether a hill or a building will steal it early. I arrive at the location at least 45 minutes before sunset. That gives me time to walk the sun line, pick two or three shooting spots along it, and get the safe, easy portraits done while the light is still just good. The spectacular frames happen at the end. Hold something back for them.
2. Shoot Against the Light for the Glow
The signature golden hour portrait is backlit: the sun behind your subject, rim light glowing in their hair, the background melting into amber. Position your subject with the sun directly behind them or just off to one side, then expose for their face. You will likely need to open up a stop or more from the meter reading, or add a small amount of fill to lift the shadows. Watch the video below and you will see this exact setup: the photographer waits until the sun is low, places it behind the model, and lets the backlight do the heavy lifting. It is the single highest-value technique in this entire guide.
3. Turn Around and Shoot With the Light Too
Backlight gets the glory, but do not forget to turn your subject around. With the low sun in front of them, you get soft, warm, direct light that is flattering in a completely different way, and it costs you nothing but a turn. Yes, there may be some squinting. Slightly narrowed eyes in warm direct light often read as natural and relaxed rather than pained, and you can manage it with the techniques in tip 6. A golden hour gallery with only backlit frames feels one-note. Give the set both directions.
4. Keep a 5-in-1 Reflector in Your Bag
A collapsible reflector is the cheapest meaningful upgrade in all of portrait photography, and golden hour is where it earns its keep. Because the sun is low, bounced light travels almost horizontally and lands exactly where you want it: on the shadow side of the face. PetaPixel's golden hour guide calls the reflector out specifically for this reason. It illuminates the face while keeping the softness of the light, balancing the scene without any batteries. Hold it low and angle it up gently. The difference between a backlit portrait with and without a reflector is the difference between a silhouette with a face and a portrait.
5. Work the Flare, but Use It as an Accent
Shooting into the sun produces lens flare, and flare is a stylistic choice, not an accident. If you want it, position the sun at the edge of the frame or partially behind your subject's head and adjust your angle in small movements. A small shift changes the flare completely. But use it as an accent, not the whole story. A flare dead center with nothing else going on reads as an exposure mistake. One or two flared frames in a gallery feel cinematic. Twenty feel like you could not control your lens.
6. Beat the Squint Without Losing the Light
Direct low sun in the eyes makes people squint, and squinting ruins more golden hour portraits than bad settings do. The fixes are simple. Have your subject close their eyes and open them on your count. Ask them to look slightly down or to the side rather than straight into the light. Sunglasses work for fashion and lifestyle frames. And remember tip 3: when the squint is winning, turn the session around and shoot backlit for a while. The light is still golden. The eyes are just no longer fighting it. My full posing guide for directing non-models covers more of these small direction tricks that keep a session comfortable.
7. Finish With Silhouettes
End the session with the most dramatic frame it offers. Position your subject against the bright sky, expose for the sky instead of the person, and use no fill light at all. What remains is pure shape against color. Silhouettes work best with clean, readable poses, so keep the body language simple and graphic: a profile, arms slightly away from the body, space between limbs so the shapes separate. It is often the single most dramatic image of the entire session, and it takes thirty seconds.
Posing During Golden Hour
The light changes fast during golden hour, so your posing needs to be efficient. I work in three distances for every setup: wide, medium, and tight. The wide shot establishes the scene and the scale of the light. The medium shot is the classic portrait. The tight shot is the face, the expression, the detail. Shooting all three at each spot gives the gallery a sense of story instead of a pile of similar frames.
Keep the body in motion between frames. Golden hour rewards movement: walking toward camera, hair caught by the evening breeze, a turn at the exact moment the light peaks. Static poses are fine, but the frames clients print are usually the ones where something was happening.
Two small things that matter more than people expect. First, chins slightly down and forward. It defines the jawline in every kind of light, and in low directional light the effect is doubled. Second, hands need a job. In pockets, on a jacket, brushing hair back. Idle hands in a backlit frame become distracting silhouettes of their own. If directing people does not come naturally to you yet, my guide to posing people who are not models is the system I have used for years.
The 3 Golden Hour Mistakes I See Every Fall
October is engagement season and family portrait season, which means I see the same three mistakes in other photographers' golden hour work every autumn.
Mistake one: blowing out the sky. The color of the sky is the entire reason you are out there. Let some of your frames sit a little darker and moodier. A blown-out white sky behind a well-exposed subject is a portrait that could have been shot at any hour. Protect the color.
Mistake two: letting auto white balance strip the warmth. I covered the fix above, but it bears repeating because it is the most common technical error in golden hour work. If your golden hour photos look oddly blue or neutral, your camera corrected away the thing you came for. Set 6000K to 6500K manually and check the back of the camera.
Mistake three: sprinting between locations. Movement kills golden hour sessions faster than bad weather. Every minute spent walking to a new spot is a minute of peak light gone forever. Pick one great location, work it in wide, medium, and tight, and trust it. A series of strong images in one place beats a frantic tour of five.
Watch: Golden Hour Natural Light Photoshoot
This behind-the-scenes video is worth your time because it shows the patience this kind of work requires. Photographer Irene Rudnyk teams up with photographers Geo Leon and Chris Hernandez to shoot model Trinity Woodward at White Point Beach in Long Beach, Los Angeles. They wait until the sun is about an hour from setting, then work the backlight: the sun low behind the model, glowing through a flowing outfit, the water and rocks doing the rest. You can watch how slowly they work a single stretch of beach, how the posing stays simple while the light does the changing, and how the final frames compare to the straight-out-of-camera shots. It is a clean demonstration of tips 1, 2, and 7 from this guide, executed by working professionals on a real shoreline.
My Golden Hour Rules After 27 Years
Personal commentary by David Christopher Lee.
I have been photographed in every kind of bad light you can imagine, and I have shot in most of them too. Here is what 27 years taught me about the best light of the day.
Rule one: the light is free, but it only pays the disciplined. Golden hour does not care about your camera. It cares whether you showed up early, scouted the sun line, and had a plan for the twenty minutes that matter. My book says it plainly: I developed my talent by doing it consistently, over and over again. Four months of shooting every day in Miami taught me more than my entire UC Berkeley education, because of the massive amount of practice. Golden hour is the same lesson on a daily timer. The photographers who own this light are not the ones with the best gear. They are the ones who show up for it, day after day, until reading it becomes instinct.
Rule two: in the end, you get what you pay for. That line is in my book because I have watched it play out hundreds of times, and it applies to light as much as gear. The photographers who treat golden hour as a casual drop-in get casual results. The ones who invest the scout, the early arrival, the reflector in the bag, get the gallery that books the next client. I have photographed more than 300 celebrities, from Lady Gaga to the Kardashians to Richard Branson, and I can tell you the famous faces do not need the light. They get the best light anyway, because that is the standard. Give your clients the same standard.
Rule three: let the light serve the session, not the other way around. There is a line I kept from my book, something Chris Rock said that stuck with me for years: wealth is not about having a lot of money, it is about having a lot of options. Golden hour hands you options: backlight, front light, flare, silhouette, blue hour after. The mistake is chasing all of them and finishing with nothing complete. Pick the two or three that serve the person in front of your camera. When I brought my Leica to the Quincy Jones hand ceremony at the Chinese Theatre, Snoop Dogg looked at it and said he was a big fan of Leicas and he knew I was not messing around. The right tool, used with intent, signals seriousness before you take a single frame. The right light, used with intent, does the same.
Show up early. Shoot the plan. Stay for blue hour. That is the whole religion.
Frequently Asked Questions
When is golden hour for photography?
Golden hour is roughly the hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset, when the sun is low but still up. For precise planning, apps like The Photographer's Ephemeris show your exact local golden hour times each day, and most planning apps default golden hour to about 40 minutes after sunrise and before sunset. Note that hills, buildings, and trees can end the usable light earlier than the app says, so scout your specific location.
What is the best white balance for golden hour portraits?
Set it manually to around 6000K to 6500K, which is roughly the cloudy or shade preset range on most cameras. Auto white balance will often neutralize the warm tones you showed up to photograph. Shoot RAW so you can fine-tune later, but starting close in camera gives you a more accurate preview and histogram.
What aperture should I use for golden hour portraits?
Shoot at f/1.8 to f/2.0 for tight portraits to get creamy bokeh from the warm background tones, and step up to f/2.8 for wider environmental shots or small groups where you need more depth of field. Keep your shutter speed fast enough to freeze your subject, at least 1/250th for portraits.
Should I use flash during golden hour?
You do not need it, but a small amount of fill flash or a reflector can lift shadows on the face without killing the mood. A reflector is the simpler choice: it bounces the low sun back onto your subject with no batteries and no settings. If you use flash, add a diffuser so the light stays soft and does not overpower the ambient warmth. For flash-based portrait control generally, see my one-light setup guide.
How do I find the exact sunset time for a portrait session?
Use a sun planning app like The Photographer's Ephemeris, which shows sunrise, sunset, and golden hour times for any location and date, plus the sun's direction so you can plan where to stand. Arrive at least 45 minutes before sunset so you can scout and shoot the safe frames before the peak light arrives.
David Christopher Lee is a Los Angeles celebrity and portrait photographer with 27 years of experience, published in GQ, Vogue, InStyle, People, and Men's Health. See more of his natural-light work in his portfolio, and read his nine-step portrait photography workflow to see how a session like this runs from first inquiry to final gallery.
Want portraits in this light? Book a session. I shoot golden hour portraits across Los Angeles, from the beaches to downtown rooftops. Tell me about your session and let's find your light.
What is your favorite golden hour shooting spot? Tell me in the comments, I read every one.