The Magic Shopping Hour
We've all heard of the magic hour for photography: that hour before sunset or after sunrise. Well, I'm introducing a new hour, and that's the hour before the hour before sunset. Okay, that sounds complicated enough, so I'm simply calling it the "Magic Shopping Hour." One of the difficulties for the average photographer is finding the proper time to go out and take photographs. Sure, I can find an hour here or there to go out and get some pictures, but how often does that overlap with the magic hours? During that the hour just before sunset, sunrise is out for me, but my brain doesn't work that early! But, it is possible, and the picture on this post of Snoqualmie Falls was captured during the magic hour with the help of the magic shopping hour.
Part of the difficulty with the magic hour prior to sunset is that this tends to be family time. This is the time that we all sit around with our family: reading, talking, or just watching TV. And this is an important time, but that doesn't diminish photography's siren call, and we can only drag our loved ones out to our lookout location to photograph the sunset so many times. The solution is the magical shopping hour, and it doesn't always need to be shopping—it could be playing catch, walking the dog, or visiting an older family member. The point here is to find something that gets you out of the house and near to the area you want to photograph the hour prior to the magic hour.
This isn't just theory, either; I come bearing a true-to-life example of just this strategy. I had been wanting to get a picture of the Snoqualmie Falls at sunset for awhile and finally came up with a plan to get my wife, Sherri, out that way at the correct time. Knowing that she was running out of Pyssla beads for her artwork (flickr set can be found here), I saw an opportunity. To get the beads, we would need to go to IKEA, which happens to be past Snoqualmie Falls. So, during dinner, I suggested we go down to get her beads tonight. Then, I said I was going to bring my camera so we could swing past the falls on the way home to get some pictures since we would be down that way anyway. And, as the picture can attest to, my plan worked out nearly to perfection: we arrived at the falls about 30 minutes prior to sunset and stuck around for nearly an hour trying to get the perfect shot. That is the birth of the magic shopping hour. But, be careful how you use it because the only fault in my plan was the unforeseen $300 tab at IKEA after we found all this stuff we didn't know we needed.
Well, there it is my first post in my new series of Dabbling Photography, as I had eluded to in my previous post here. I am writing these for people like myself: amateur photographers who aren't—and don't plan on being—experts; we just dabble in photography. Tell me what you think and feel free to send your ideas as well.