Golden hour in Philadelphia, month by month

Sunset in Philadelphia lands around 4:35 in the afternoon in early December and around 8:30 in late June. Nearly four hours of swing. Almost every scheduling problem in this business comes from people planning a session as though that number were fixed.

What golden hour actually is

The hour or so before sunset, when the sun is low enough that its light travels through more atmosphere, loses its blue end and goes warm. Shadows get long and soft, faces stop squinting, and everything picks up a bit of gold.

Two things people get wrong about it.

First, it is not an hour everywhere. Its length depends on the angle at which the sun meets the horizon, and that angle changes with the season. In June the sun comes down at a shallow slant and the good light stretches out. In December it drops more directly and the warm window is tighter.

Second, the hour before sunset is not the same as the hour of usable light. In a place with anything on the horizon — buildings, a ridge, a tree line — the sun disappears from where you are standing well before it sets. In the Wissahickon the valley walls end the session up to an hour early. On the open fields at Valley Forge you get the light right down to the horizon. Same city, same clock, an hour of difference.

Month by month

Approximate Philadelphia sunset times, rounded, and what I do with each month.

• January — sunset around 4:45 to 5:15. Short days, but the sun stays low all afternoon, so good light starts by about two. Bare trees. Genuinely underrated.
• February — around 5:15 to 5:45. Same as January with slightly more room. Still winter light, still nobody booking it.
• March — 5:50, then jumping past 7:00 after the clocks change. The single biggest shift of the year. Early buds, bare structure, unpredictable weather.
• April — around 7:25 to 7:50. Blossom, fresh green, and light reaching into woodland before the canopy closes over. My favorite underbooked month.
• May — around 7:50 to 8:15. Full green, long evenings, warm but not yet oppressive. The best all-round month in Philadelphia.
• June — around 8:20 to 8:30. Latest sunsets of the year. Long, generous golden hour. Also past most small children’s bedtimes, which is the catch.
• July — around 8:15 to 8:30. Same as June, plus heat and haze. Sunrise sessions start making real sense.
• August — around 7:40 to 8:10. Evenings pulling back noticeably. Meadow grass at its best.
• September — around 7:00 to 7:30. The quality month. Warm enough to be comfortable, dark early enough to be practical, and the light has lost the summer haze.
• October — around 6:10 to 6:40. Peak demand, and deservedly. Foliage plus a civilised sunset time.
• November — around 4:50 after the clocks change. Brutal for anyone working a standard day. Bare structure and low light all afternoon.
• December — around 4:35 to 4:40. Earliest sunsets of the year, in the first half of the month rather than at the solstice, which surprises people. Blue hour arrives before dinner.

The two dates that ruin plans

The clocks go forward on the second Sunday in March and back on the first Sunday in November. Those two Sundays move sunset by a full hour overnight, and they cause more scheduling confusion than anything else in my calendar.

The November one is the painful one. The Saturday before, a five o’clock session is comfortably in golden light. The Saturday after, five o’clock is dark. If you are booking a late-autumn session, check which side of that Sunday you are on before you agree a time.

The March one is the good news: overnight, evening sessions become possible again after four months of them not being.

Why winter is not the disaster it sounds like

An early sunset sounds like less light. In practice winter offers more usable hours, not fewer.

At the winter solstice the sun in Philadelphia never climbs much above about a quarter of the way up the sky, even at noon. It stays low all day. Which means the harsh overhead light that ruins midday sessions in June simply does not happen in December. From roughly two in the afternoon you have soft, angled, directional light.

Compare that with July, when the sun is high and punishing from ten until six, and your options are early morning, late evening, or shade. Winter has a longer usable window than midsummer. It just ends earlier in the day. There is more on this in the winter session guide.

Working around bedtimes and school

This is where the astronomy meets real life, and where I do most of my actual scheduling work.

If you have a child under four, golden hour in June and July is after bedtime. There is no way around it. Either you accept an overtired child in the photographs, or you book a morning session, or you shoot in open shade earlier in the evening and give up the gold. I usually recommend the third.

If you have school-age children, November through January makes a weekday session after pickup essentially impossible. Those months are weekends only.

If both parents work standard hours, weekday evening sessions realistically work from about April to September and not otherwise.

The overlooked option is morning. Sunrise light is identical in quality to sunset light, parks are empty, and small children are at their best rather than their worst. The only cost is getting everyone out of the house. For families with toddlers, a morning session is very often the right answer, and it is covered further in the toddler session guide.

When the forecast says cloudy

Do not cancel. An overcast day is not a compromise, it is a different and often better set of conditions.

Cloud turns the whole sky into one enormous soft light source. No squinting, no harsh shadows, no patches of blown-out sun through the trees, and no need to position everyone at one precise angle. Skin tones are even. Colors are saturated rather than bleached. And crucially, the entire day becomes available, so an overcast Saturday can host a session at eleven in the morning that would be unshootable in full sun.

The genuine weather problems are heavy rain and hard midday sun, and only one of those is on most people’s worry list. If rain is forecast, the rain backup guide covers how that gets handled.

When you book a family session, the start time comes from all of this: the month, the location’s horizon, the ages of your kids and what the sky is doing. That is why I ask what time works for you and then suggest something different.