Golden hour can make you think you’re improving when you’re really just collecting warm light. That habit can also shrink how often you shoot, which quietly slows everything else you’re trying to get better at.
Coming to you from James Reader, this contrarian video takes aim at the idea that “good light” only shows up right after sunrise and right before sunset. Reader explains how that belief turns into scheduling pressure: you wait all week for a narrow window, rush once you arrive, then judge your results based on color instead of what the frame is actually saying. If most mornings are impossible and most evenings are busy, you start telling yourself the rest of the day is pointless, which is how you end up shooting less without even noticing it. The sharpest point here is not that golden hour looks bad, it’s that it can become a crutch that decides when you’re “allowed” to make photos. If you’ve ever skipped a walk because the light wasn’t “right,” you’ll recognize the trap in about 30 seconds.
Reader then gets practical and moves into harsh daylight, the kind most people avoid. He shares a simple positioning rule: stop putting the sun where it flattens everything, and instead use shadow direction to bring back depth. He also argues you should stop trying to “fix” contrast in scenes that are naturally punchy or naturally washed out, because forcing everything into the same middle look makes images feel weird and over-processed. There’s a pointed warning about the temptation to pull detail from everywhere at once, and how that can make a photo look artificial even if the exposure is technically “correct.” If you’ve been relying on soft evening light to do the heavy lifting, this section makes you confront how much composition and subject choice matter when the light refuses to be flattering.
The editing advice is where this gets more uncomfortable, in a good way. Reader says two controls decide whether bright-day files feel honest or gloomy: exposure and white balance, especially when your camera’s idea of “accurate” doesn’t match what your eyes experienced. He talks about using targeted edits instead of global fixes when one area of the frame is out of balance, like sand that jumps too bright or a sky that goes heavy and electric. He names Lightroom Classic tools like gradients and color selection as ways to tame specific problems without dragging the entire image around. If you usually correct everything with one big slider move, this will push you toward quieter, more local decisions that keep the scene from looking engineered.
The video also covers what to do when the light is flat and gray and when it’s night. You’ll hear why a blown-out blank sky can sometimes be the better choice, why color can be either the anchor or the distraction, and why getting closer at night can clean up chaos without making the scene feel empty. Reader frames all of this as permission to shoot on normal days, not perfect days, which is a mindset shift more than a technique list. If you’ve built your whole routine around chasing sunsets, the later sections make that routine feel unnecessarily fragile. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Reader.
1 Comment
The concept presented in this article definitely does apply to me. When the weather is clear with full, unabated sunshine, I do avoid shooting during the mid-day hours. I will shoot for the first 3 hours after sunrise and the last 2 1/2 hours before sunset when days are long in May, June, and July (in somewhat northern latitudes). And during the winter when the days are short I will avoid shooting between approximately 10:30AM and 2:15 PM when it is totally clear. Of course these times will vary depending upon how far one is from the equator and what time of year it is.
So yes I do exactly what the article accuses us of doing. Why? Well, to be honest, I do not like the way photos look when they are taken during clear weather when the sun is directly overhead. I do not like that look, because the bright areas of the photo are so much brighter than the shadows. I do not want a photo of a deer if the deer's nose is casting a shadow upon his chest/neck area. I do not want a photo of a bird if the top of the bird is super bright and the belly of the bird is in shadow.
I do not like photos taken in a woodland environment when every tree trunk and every branch and twig and leaf casts a shadow. That results in an aesthetic that has very bright areas in the frame and very dark areas in the frame, and that type of high contrast in the background is really ugly looking to me.
Last week, the forecast was for overcast skies all day, so I drove to an area about 45 minutes north of where I am staying to a spot where I have a feeding station in the woods for the woodland birds. But after shooting for just a few minutes, the cloud cover faded away and it ended up being sunny. I stuck it out for two hours, trying desperately to find a way to make things work. I moved the feeders to several different spots. I changed my shooting position many times. I went back to the car and got my pruners and cut some branches and twigs down so that there wouldn't be so many shadows cast on the perches where the birds land. But nothing worked. I literally could not make an image of a bird that looked the way I wanted it to look.
If someone is shooting in the woods, and does not use flash, and hates the look of bright spot and shadow in the same image, then what do you suggest they do?
I know many full time professional wildlife photographers, and not a single one of them will shoot in the middle of the day when it is full sun. These are guys who take the photos you see in NG, on hunting magazine covers, who shoot the video footage you see on Planet Earth and BBC nature/wildlife documentaries. I figure they know what they are doing. And to a man, they shoot when the light is great, they shoot when the light is good, they shoot when the light is subpar ,,,,, but none of them shoot when the light is terrible. Are all of these highly successful career photographers wrong? Really?
Is the suggestion that we should shoot anyway, even if we do not like the results? If so, then why? We already know what we are doing with a camera because we have spent decades shooting nearly full time. So it's not like we need practice. So what exactly is the value of shooting in really harsh light, if we do not like the results that we get in those conditions?