golden hour

With the sun low, light travels through more atmosphere, losing blue and softening. Aircraft photographed then pick up warm highlights along the fuselage and long shadows across the airframe, and the sky behind holds colour instead of going white. It is short, it moves through the year, and planning a session around it is most of what separates good aviation photographs from ordinary ones.

Nearby in Photography

• focal length — The optical property, in millimetres, that determines a lens's angle of view and magnification.
• full frame — A sensor the size of a 35mm film frame, around 36 by 24 millimetres.
• heat haze — The shimmering distortion caused by light passing through air of varying temperature.
• histogram — A graph of how many pixels fall at each brightness level in an image.