Golden Hour Calculator

What the number actually depends on

The golden hour is not an hour. In Hamburg in June it runs 58 minutes; in December it is down to 34.

The window shortens the closer you get to the equator: in Singapore it is under 25 minutes year-round.

The gap between a number that goes into a quote and one that holds on the day is rarely the formula — it is whether the constraints were entered honestly. That is why the inputs are spelled out below.

Common mistakes

The places where the arithmetic is right and the day still falls over:

• Planning the golden-hour shot last in the schedule, so every overrun eats it
• Using sunset time as the end of the window instead of the start of blue hour
• Forgetting that a hill or building to the west cuts the window short

In day-to-day production

Blue hour starts when the sun is 4° below the horizon and ends at 6° — typically 20 to 35 minutes in Central Europe.

The number belongs in pre-production — the point where a decision is still free to change. Working it out on the shoot day is no longer calculating; it is finding out.

In TillyGen this is not a separate step: the result sits inside the plan itself, alongside the shot list, schedule and call sheet. Change a constraint and the dependent values move with it — the affected parts of the plan are flagged rather than quietly left behind.