In our regular run through of photo tips we look at photographing in the blue hour to add drama to your images.

The golden hour has lots of column inches in ‘how-to’ photo manuals for good reason, but the blue hour barely gets a mention. A time of day more known to landscape practitioners, twilight is less often explored by nature photographers on safari, transfixed and taken up as we tend to be by the rich seam of subjects and warm hues around the African sunset.  It’s a shame because that secret space between sundown and total darkness is, quite literally, a cool spot for some intensely moody wildlife pictures.

Part of the reason blue hour photography gets overlooked is that our eyes naturally adjust for the blue colour cast you get in the sky at dusk.  We simply don’t notice it’s there. Plus, if you’re shooting in RAW (which we urge you do to), with your camera’s white balance on auto as default, your camera will also make adjustments to correct the bluish hue at this time of day. Luckily with just a few tweaks it’s quite easy to bring out the cool blues of this magical hour and make a dramatic feature of them in your work.

It’s not just the chance to extend your shooting time with images conveying a completely different vibe to those you’ve just been getting at sunset, that makes blue hour photography worth trying. It’s the fact this might well be your only chance to capture some of Africa’s fascinating crepuscular species, active mainly at dusk and dawn, as they take a brief bow on the photographic stage.

Our top tips for photography in the blue hour

• Bear in mind the word ‘hour’ here is a bit of a misnomer –  the window of opportunity for these pictures is more like 30 minutes, give or take, so start the search for suitable subjects as soon as your sunset shooting’s over.
• Prepare for photography in very low light conditions – get as much speed as possible, wait for subjects to pause, and brace well.
• You’re mostly looking for opportunities where your subject will stand out against the paler background of the sky – so you need to keep the subject’s shape clearly defined, essentially like photographing silhouettes.  Remember that your subject needs to be well separated from its surroundings because you’re not recording sufficient, or any, detail in it when it’s shot against the paler sky. That said, distant topographical features can look really good in recession with that blue cast over the scene.
• Your blue hour results will have a compelling feel; both eerie and nocturnal. We’re always trying to match the mood of a picture with the character or behaviour of a subject so the sort of thing that would work well for the treatment would be an owl on a branch, for example, or a loping hyena outlined against the twilight sky as it prowls across the horizon in your picture. Both are creatures that emerge at dusk. But it’s fun to try out the technique on anything that crosses your path before dark.
• If you’re shooting in RAW, on auto white balance, the camera is going to try to neutralise the blue colour cast at twilight. To achieve decent blue hour shots you’ll have to do one of two things: you can change the white balance in-camera to record the cooler tones of the scene at the point of capture or you can recover the bluish cast of twilight at the post-processing stage on computer. Whichever route you choose you can still get great blue hour pictures.

• The advantage of changing your white balance in-camera is that you’re recording your vision of a picture at the ‘decisive moment’ it’s captured. You’re bringing out the blue tones because that’s the image you have in your head. The RAW file will reflect that, which may be important if your image does well in competition and you need to supply the RAW file to demonstrate minimal post-processing. And you can see the effect on the preview screen of your camera – and perhaps adjust exposure if you feel that would enhance the image.
• You need to be able to quickly make the shift in colour temperature at the flick of a switch, in situ, in low light, with an exciting wildlife subject in view, which means knowing your way round your camera buttons and menu. But this isn’t hard to learn.
• If you choose to change the colour temperature in camera there are two ways you can do this. You can use the tungsten white balance preset (a really simple way to cool things down – it represents a Kelvin temperature of 3200K) or dial in a custom white balance. The lower the number on the Kelvin scale the colder and vice versa. We’re usually in the 3,000K ballpark when doing our blue hour pictures, but you might need to adjust for individual situations.
• Don’t forget to reset your white balance after the session or the next images you take will also have a blue cast. OK, so Picasso got away with a blue period, but you might not!
• You can fine-tune the tungsten or custom white balance in post-processing, or even remove the blue effect altogether if you decide it doesn’t work (but your RAW file will still reflect the blue setting).
• Alternatively, you can shoot in auto white balance, doing all the blue adjustment in post-processing, using ‘temperature’ and ‘tint’ colour sliders to cool the image. Adjusting white balance in RAW processing gives you considered and full control over how your blue hour pictures turn out after the fact, but your RAW file won’t show the effect.
• Landscape photographers often choose to shoot blue hour pictures near an artificial source of illumination like street lighting for added brightness and pop. It’s not really viable on safari, unless you’re at a waterhole which is lit up as it goes dark, like the night hides on Zimanga private game reserve. This is when you can add an interesting twist to big game captures in the brief minutes before it gets completely dark.
• Blue hour images add a novel, and intriguing, twist to your safari portfolio, but use the technique sparingly, its impact can pall if you overdo it.

Elephant at dusk, Zimanga, South Africa

Blue hour pictures have bags of mood and a great sense of the approaching dark night. The intense blue is a real about-face on the classic oranges and reds of the golden-hour on safari that we’re all so accustomed too.

Canon EOS 1Dx II, EF100-400mm at 278mm, 1/160 sec, f/8, ISO 320