Twenty minutes of blue

Everyone talks about golden hour. It's nice, sure. Warm light, long shadows, everyone looks good. But I've slowly become a blue hour person.

Blue hour is the bit right after the sun goes down, before it's properly dark. The sky turns this deep, clean blue and the city lights come on, and for a short while the two are balanced. The sky isn't too bright, the lamps aren't too harsh. Everything just sort of glows.

The problem is it doesn't last. Twenty minutes, maybe thirty if the weather is kind. Then the sky goes black and it's just a night photo.

A small walk in Offenburg

This one happened on an autumn evening in Offenburg. Nothing planned. We just went out for a small walk through town, the kind you take to stretch your legs after a long day, and ended up in the town square.

And then the sky did that thing. It went that exact shade of blue. The big canopy over the square was lit up from underneath in pink and purple, the tree next to it still had its yellow autumn leaves catching the street light, and people were standing around a little stall like it was any other evening. Which, for them, it was.

I stopped and took the photo. It's the one at the top of this page, and still one of my favourites.

Good light doesn't wait for you to be ready. You either carry the camera or you don't.

I think about this outside photography too. A lot of the good stuff comes in short windows. A conversation that only happens because you stayed out ten minutes longer. A walk you almost skipped because you were tired.

That probably sounds like a fridge magnet. I'm still learning how to say these things without sounding like one. But I do believe it.

So now I check sunset times. If I'm out and the sky starts turning blue, I stop and look around. Most evenings nothing happens. Some evenings you get the square.

— Desly