Tenby Harbour – Chasing Blue Hour

My blue hour capture of Tenby Harbour which I had wanted to take for years. *Two image panoramic 30s 58mm F11 ISO 100.*

Whilst it may not be as popular as golden hour, blue hour is often held up as a key time to go out and photograph for its cold but even light. However, I’d never been able to utilise it to capture a good image despite several attempts. This led me a while a go to completely rethink my approach and figure out what I was doing wrong. Looking at images online it quickly became clear that many photos taken during blue hour use the contrast of warm artificial light to make the subjects really pop. Some indeed were landscape images that used the contrast of the sun’s glow on the horizon, like I had tried to replicate before, but even many of those images had water in the foreground to give that warmer light something to reflect off.

This got me thinking about a book that was given to me a long time ago called Magic Harbours, written by Jamie Owen with photography by Martin Cavaney. This book has been released as a companion to the BBC TV series of the same name, where Jamie sailed around the Welsh coast in a more than one hundred-year-old sailing ship called Mascotte (you can see it by clicking here). The front cover of this book is a photo of Tenby harbour at blue hour, and you’ll know from last week’s blog that this is a place I also know well. A fun little tidbit, whilst I am almost certain these images were taken on film there’s an early bit of photoshop at play here. The new lifeboat station was under construction at the time and looked a bit ugly in its unfinished state, complete with large red crane. Whilst you can see it in the image inside the book, it was removed from the front cover, although not perfectly. Looking carefully, you can see that some small details have not been entirely removed. I’m a photographer, I just can’t help myself.

So, because of this I was keen for several years to go back to Tenby to get a blue hour photo of the harbour for myself. Thankfully when I managed to return last month the weather over the course of the weekend was favourable as was the bright almost full moon that added an extra dimension to my images. It’s rare you can get such good photos with so little preparation, though to be fair I did go out every morning and evening for a few days in a row to get it right. I also used it as a learning experience to better understand when the best moment to take a blue hour photo is by repeatedly taking images over the course of an hour each time, and I wanted to share my findings here. The sweet spot is when the brightness of the natural blue light it balanced with the warm artificial light, go too early or too late and the images just isn’t as good. You’ll see that as you look at the images below.

I hope you enjoy the photos and perhaps it’ll inspire you to take your camera out at blue hour, just like I was inspired by the book.