Just a friendly reminder that next weekend, the weekend of March 14th is the start of Daylight Savings Time. That means sunrise is a hell of a lot earlier in the morning and sunset is way later in the day. Some of you early risers may have already noticed the sun is coming up faster in the morning. For some of you this is a problem because you cant get out of bed, you are starting to miss the sunrise shots that you have been getting all winter when the sun would rise around 7-7:30am, even today official sunrise was 6:12am.
The reason for this obvious reminder post you ask? While is may seem blatantly obvious that next Sat. night we “spring forward” with the clocks by an hour. What you might not realize is that for ONE WEEK, from Sunday the 14th to Friday the 19th, Sunrise will again be close to 7am. After that each passing day we will start to loose time at a rate of 1-3 minutes a morning. At which time you will have to start pulling yourselves out of bed earlier and earlier again. Why not take advantage of this, plan some shots this week when sunrise is early and the go execute those shots next week while you have little extra time to sleep. Remember, its going to get light earlier, but it isn’t getting warmer yet, its a lot colder getting up at 5am to shoot sunrise than it is to get up a 6am to shoot it.
Tip visit www.sunrisesunset.com and you can get official calendars for your area. You can also include Civil Twilight, Nautical Twilight, and Astronomical Twilight. I personally include Civil and Nautical in my calendars.
Civil Twilight is defined as when the sun is just below the horizon to a point about 6 degrees below the horizon. It is at this point in which you still get a little glow left at the horizon line, but the sky’s are turning deep shades of blue. Also if there are some clouds in the sky this is the point in which warm reds and oranges will appear on the undersides of the clouds but the rest of the photo will be that deep blue color.
Nautical Twilight is defined as when the sun is between 6 degrees and 12 degrees below the horizon. It’s at this point when all warm colors are gone and the real blues come out. This is also a very narrow window of time before night hits. It’s the point in which ambient light and artificial light, like that from buildings, are in balance with one another.
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