the blue hour

The prompt this week at 52 Photos Project is the "blue hour".  This is the time of day just before sunrise and just after sunset when the sky is not completely dark but the sun is gone (or has yet to arrive) and the sky turns, well, kind of blue.

I've wanted to try to take a blue hour photo for some time, but the motivation just wasn't there--the morning time is way too early for me and at night I am usually settled in from a long day and don't really want to pack up my gear and go out for a photo shoot.  But, thanks to Bella at 52 Photos I had all the motivation I needed this week.  It had to be done, so I went to one of my favorite spots just down the street from my apartment.

I set up my tripod and played around with my camera settings a bit.  All of these images were taken at f/8 or f/9, the shutter speed varied from 1 to 3 seconds and I set an ISO of 100 or 200. This photo below was actually one of the last ones I took and really has the darkest "blue" hue to it because the lighting was just right (about 9pm).

You can see the various different hues of blue as the following pictures were taken about 10-15 minutes earlier than the first one.

I like the car headlights from the Henry Hudson Parkway in the bottom left corner of the next two shots but it was still a little too light out to capture the best blue.

While I am not completely happy with these photos, I did manage to capture the blue-ness so I can't complain too much.  I am very happy that I finally got myself out there with my camera to try this out--thanks Bella!  If you want to know when the blue hour is where you live, check out this site where it tells you the time of the blue hour all over the world.

And yes, of course I had to take a shot with my iPhone, although the "blue" is primarily thanks to the lo-mob app because I couldn't keep the shutter open long enough to achieve the blue effect just within the phone's camera.