Capturing the Blue Hour with Your Phone
Tuesday 2 August 2022, 13:31 by Elja Trum | 4,249 views | 0 commentsThis article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.
Capturing a beautiful blue evening sky with your smartphone does not always go smoothly. Your phone's automatic white balance turns the beautiful blue sky grey, removing all the atmosphere from the photo.
The automatic white balance makes it almost a black-and-white photo
There is a trick that lets you easily get a beautiful blue sky after all. You can do this without diving into the settings or using another camera app.
It takes a few seconds for your phone, at least on my iPhone, to adjust the white balance. You can make use of this.
What you do need is a yellowish light source, such as a street lamp. For example, point your camera at the pavement where the warmer yellow light falls. Your smartphone will now correct for the yellow light and make the white balance much cooler and bluer.
Then point your phone's camera back at the subject you wanted to capture with the blue sky and quickly take the photo. You need to be quick to prevent the white balance from being corrected again.
With this trick, you can quickly and easily take a nice photo of a blue sky using your phone's standard camera app. The photos in this article also came straight from the camera, without any adjustments afterwards.
About the author
Elja Trum is the founder of Photofacts and online photography course website Photofacts Academy. He has been writing about photography since 2006. Elja is also the author of (Dutch) books on composition, black-and-white photography, flash photography and portrait photography.
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Elja Trum
Photofacts; everything to do with photography!
Would you like to take better photos and keep up with what is happening in photography? Photofacts publishes articles that teach you something about photography — from a product announcement to a practical shooting tip or a look at a website. Photofacts covers photography every day and is a hobby project of Elja Trum's that got out of hand. The articles are written by a team of volunteer authors. If you would enjoy writing one or more articles for Photofacts, do get in touch.More about PhotofactsPhotofacts is made possible in part by
