The Blue Hour, Properly Observed

It is not actually an hour, and it is rarely blue. But there are about eighteen minutes of evening — varying with latitude, weather, and time of year — when a winter landscape opens itself to a camera in a way it does not do at any other time. The snow turns the color of cold milk. Shadows go cobalt. The sky, just after sunset, lights from below in a way that no daytime sky ever does.

I have been working a single pine tree above Red Mountain Pass for six winters. The same tree, roughly the same hour, when conditions allow. I have made perhaps three photographs of it I would defend. The point is not the tree. The point is that the photograph is being made by the eighteen minutes, and the tree is being kind enough to participate.

If you want to learn the blue hour, pick something — a barn, a bend in a river, a single rock — and visit it twenty times. The twenty-first will teach you what the first nineteen did not.