BlueHour
Version 1.2
Bottom Line: A good utility to help plan twilight photography.
BlueHour
There are two special types of twilight called blue hour and golden hour. Both create awesome light for photographers. Blue hour occurs before sunrise and after sunset. The sky turns deep blue during this period of time. The Golden hour occurs right after sunrise and just before sunset when everything has an golden-orange tint (In Texas, the Golden hour is really more like the Golden twelve minutes….).
Of course, these times change daily. Knowing when these times are gives you the opportunity to shoot in some great light. BlueHour by Baum Computer & Graphics is a simple utility that tells you the approximate times of the Golden hours and the Blue hours for the current day.
Shooting during the Golden hour gives your photography a rich, warm, golden tone. Shooting during Blue hour yields deep, rich blues and purples and can be used to create dramatic silhouettes.
BlueHour tells you sunrise and sunset times based on your iPhone’s current time zone setting, and then adds about 20 minutes or so either way, suggesting the best times to photograph to take advantage of the light.
BlueHour a simple and great idea. The sunrise/sunset calculations are location-based. It uses your iPhone’s coordinates to determine your location, even on a 2G. This is a very nice feature if your iPhone’s system timezone is still set to Cupertino for example, but you’re in Los Angeles. This enables the app to give you fairly accurate, location-based information on sunrise/sunset times and Blue hour/Golden hour times. The app also shows an analog display of the next day’s times.
For the most part, I’ve found the times displayed to be accurate — maybe one or two minutes off.
There’s no way to enter a different date into the app — it only gives the times for the current day — making it more difficult to plan a twilight shoot ahead of time.
I’d like some way to enter a date to determine Blue/Golden hour times for other dates, not just today or tomorrow. However, even without this feature, it’s still a very useful utility.
BlueHour is a great idea. I love to shoot using the warm light of the Golden hour. BlueHour helps to schedule my photography. It’s a good, simple utility for determining the best times to photograph using Blue hour/Golden hour light.
BlueHour is $0.99 USD. | App Store link: Blue Hour
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