What's the Best Time of Day for a Photoshoot?
Oh hello! Welcome back to my blog. I missed a few Sundays because of life things, but things are calming down, so I’m back on the posts! This week, we’re talking about light and when the best time to shoot is, based on the vibe and look you want for your photos.
I’m sure we all know about golden hour, blue hour, and bright mid-day light. If you don't know about those or are a little unsure here’s what they are:
Golden Hour
This is the light when the sun first rises and sets past the horizon. With the sun’s position, the light has a gold color to it and is super soft. Soft light has lighter shadows and isn’t as bright or harsh.
Golden hour is most photographers go to time to shoot. The light is beautiful, the shadows are nice and soft which makes it easier to capture multiple beautiful shots. If you're wanting your pictures to have a more warm, romantic feel to them, golden hour is the perfect time for your shoot.
Blue Hour
This is pretty much at dawn and dusk time of the day before the sun rises and after the sun sets. The light that's still shining on the horizon has a more blue tint to it and is also soft.
Blue hour adds a more edgy, dark kinda vibe to the photos. If you’re wanting your photos to look more moody this light is perfect for that. With there not being as much light out, your photographer may need to use a flash or some type of additive light.
Mid-day Light
This is when the sun is right above us in the sky casting harsh, bright light causing dark, hard shadows. This type of light is usually happening between 11am-6pm, this does vary based on where you live.
In more recent years, more photographers and people are leaning more towards shooting in the bright light. Back in the day photographers would do all they could to avoid shooting in the harsh light. But if the photographer knows what they’re doing and how to shoot in bright light, your pictures could look amazing in this bright light. Or you can always look for a shady spot on a bright, sunny day.
The time of daylight does vary and depends on where you live and the season you’re in. Here in Montana, during the summer our days are so long, literally we have almost 11-12 hours of daylight. Sunrise is a little before 6am and sunset is around 9:30pm, but during winter time the sun doesn’t rise until 8 or 9am and it sets around 4-5pm. That’s only 8-9 hours of light, which is a wild swing of daylight throughout the year.
When you plan out your next shoot, first think about how you want your photos to look or the vibe you want for them. Pinterest is always a great way to get inspiration for how you want your shoot to look or vibe you’re going for. Let your photographer know what you want and make sure they’re okay with it or can do what you want. If you want to shoot in bright mid-day light, make sure your photographer has the skills to do that and is okay with it. If they aren’t okay with it, find a photographer who can do what you want.
Another thing to check or think about when you’re planning your shoot is what the weather will be like. If you’re schedule only allows you to shoot during the middle of the day and you do not want the bright sunny look for your photos, you can plan you’re shoot on a day when it’s going to be cloudy. Clouds act like a diffuser for the harsh light, making it more soft and even distributed. If you want to do golden hour photos, the sunset is so much prettier when there's clouds in the sky. But not too many clouds that it's overcast because that will hide the sunset.
I hope you found this blog post to be helpful in planning your next shoot!
Spring Flower Petites!
Spring is here! Well, kind of in Montana. The weather here is all over the place. One minute it’s warm and sunny out, the next it's raining, then super fuckin windy and cold. Then before you know it it’s snowing. I know, every state says ‘Just give the weather 5 minutes, it’ll change’, but Montana is really like that.
Even with the weather being all over the place, spring has still sprung! The grass is growing back, the trees and hedges are starting to develop little buds on them. Little flowers are starting to pop up. It’s a magical time of year.
I had this bride come to me with this amazing idea for some spring-themed engagement photos. With all my weddings I offer a free engagement or family shoot to give us a chance to work together. This bride came to me with a great idea to do engagement pictures surrounded by hanging flowers. Thankfully I already had a bunch of fake flowers and set-up my home studio, so I was able to bring her vision to life!
After doing their shoot, I had all those hanging flowers. With this bride's permission, she let me use her idea to do Spring Flower Petites with them! Petites are just like minis, they are a short photo session for a cheaper price, I just gave them a different name to help make them stand out.
I advertised them on my photography Instagram, but once I announced they were open for signups no one hit me up to do them. Dude, it was literally crickets. Haha. God bless Facebook though. I shared these petites on FB Marketplace and in the selling groups and so many people were interested in them! I had 3 shoots this past Saturday and my week is filled with them.
I’m so pumped people signed up for these. It’s so embarrassing when you put a creative idea out there and no one signs up for it. It’s hard to not take it personally.
The setup for this shoot is in my home studio. I did a two-light setup for these shoots. One light (the key light) was in front of the families/couples and I had one pointed on the background of the paper (the fill light) to help with all the shadows from the key light. I’ve been using white background paper with the flowers hanging all over in front of it, but thankfully some people wanted to use colored background paper.
I didn't realize that I was almost out of white paper when I started advertising. Haha. One thing I’m learning with having a studio is that seamless paper gets so dirty! It probably doesn’t help that there is a bunch of dirt around the shop and that my studio is in my fiance's workshop.
I’m figuring out ways to keep the paper clean though. I tried spraying it with this latex finish which made it easier to wipe off some dirt, but it didn't fully keep the dirt off. Last night I spray painted the dirty spots with white spray paint so hopefully that helps make my white paper last until I get my next roll.
I love how the pictures have been turning out though! I hope you guys like the pictures too!
Oh hello! My name is Katie!
Get to know your new go-to photographer.
Hey! How’s it going? Thank you so much for browsing my website!
This is my first blog post so I figured why not make it about getting to know your new go-to photographer :)
Our Christmas Photo 2024
So hello again! Haha, Let’s start this right. My name is Katie Thompson, I’m 33 years old and living in beautiful Montana. I’m engaged to the love of my life, we’ve been together for almost 2.5 years. My fiancè proposed to me this past September (2024) on top of the Empire State Building while we were in New York City shooting New York Indonesia Fashion Week, again! We have the sweetest boys Frank and Howard. Frank is a 3-year-old healer/shepherd mix and Howard is a 1-year-old healer/border collie mix. We plan to one day have an army of dogs.
Right now we are currently in the motion of moving to the Big Island of Hawaii! We’re working hard and manifesting that we’ll be moving this August (2025🤞🏻). We are sick of the winters here in Montana and want to live somewhere we can live off our land year-round. You don’t really realize when it’s happening, but 6-8 months of the year here has shitty, cold weather and it starts to take its toll on you. So we out!
✨I feel like this is important to explain, with getting married, relocating my business, and for publication reasons, I’m in the process of changing my business name from Katie Thompson Photography to Katie Schott that Photography. Haaa, you get it? Haha ✨
I’m going to be real with you guys. I don’t know much about blogging, this is kind of new to me. But with moving and starting my business somewhere new, I’m trying my best to boost my social media and online presence which apparently means becoming a blogger now. 🤦🏼♀️ Please be patient with me, these first few blogs might be a little rough with figuring everything out.
I didn’t realize being a photographer in this day and age also meant being a content creator, doing my own marketing, and design person. I didn’t realize how many hats I’d be wearing and all the other things I’d have to do besides taking pictures and editing them to have a successful photography business. Not only that, everything needs to look cute, be posted in an eye-catching way, and be cohesive with you and your brand while being unique and somehow standing out in an oversaturated market. It’s a lot, so please know I’m out here trying my best and doing what I need to do be get my art seen by the right people, which is hopefully you.
A little info about my photography journey, I’ve been doing photography for 6 years now. I didn’t know I was into photography until someone gifted me a camera and I haven’t been able to put it down since. I started out taking landscapes and pictures of nature, then I enrolled in a photography course at a community college in Plano Texas right before COVID hit. My classes were canceled due to COVID, but I kept trying to learn from YouTube and good old-fashioned practice.
My business really took off when I moved to Montana. That’s when I started focusing more on portraits and family photography and just fell in love with it! I think the thing I love most about photography is making people feel beautiful while hyping them up. I was fortunate enough to enroll in the last ever PI Course at the Rocky Mountain School of Photography and become certified as a Professional Photographer. This photography school has been around for almost 40 years and is well known around the world, but they unfortunately closed their doors last year.
I try to not let photography talk over my life, but it’s hard. You can ask my fiancé, I’m literally always thinking of a concept I want to shoot, I’m always looking at pictures on Pinterest, listening to photography/business podcasts, and watching YouTube videos to grow my knowledge to become the best photographer I can be. When I’m not doing that: I love to cook and make natural home remedies, and I’m working on getting into reading and learning about herbs. I really want to start homesteading and living off our land, but that’s what Hawaii is for! I love to go for walks, hikes, float the river, and camping. I like to chill and do nothing, but I love being outside and enjoying the nice weather when it’s here.
My plan for my blog going forward is to make one post a week on Sundays. I’ll make posts about myself as a photographer, the world of photography/photography industry, or about a photoshoot or wedding I shot and am pumped on. I’m mainly doing this to help my business Pinterest account grow and to help grow my SEO on Google. With moving to Hawaii, my main focus right now is to grow my online presence, grow my trust and relatability with clients, and grow my business overall as a whole. So thank you for being here to help me accomplish that! I really appreciate it.
-Katie Thompson, soon to be Schott 😉
