How much usable light there is per day in Mallorca, Ibiza and Madrid

Golden hour and blue hour add up to 45 to 55 minutes of usable light a day. It is longer in December than in June, and it lasts as long as a real session.

There are two windows of light at the end of the day and they are almost always counted separately: the golden hour, with the sun still up, and the blue hour, once it has set. Neither of them lasts an hour. What matters when you are calling a crew is not each one on its own, but the sum: how much time there is in total before there is nothing left.

The whole window, month by month

The 15th of each month, local time, calculated the same way as in the two previous guides: golden from 6° to 0° and blue from −4° to −6°.

It is longer in December than in June

The shortest window of the year falls in March and September, and the longest in December and June. It is not a quirk of the maths: it is the angle at which the sun crosses the horizon. At the equinoxes it drops almost vertically and crosses the band quickly; at the solstices it drops at a slant and takes longer to get through it.

The difference between the best month and the worst is ten minutes, from 45 to 55. It sounds like little. It is 20 %, and in practice it is one more look or one more shot.

What does change far more is the time of day. In Palma the window starts at 17:07 in January and at 20:37 in June: three and a half hours apart on the same table.

And what time people actually shoot

Everything above is calculation. This is archive: the exact time of day six productions published on this site were shot, taken from the EXIF of the original files.

The median is 36 minutes —almost exactly as long as golden hour, which runs from 35 to 43—. A photo session is, measured, the size of one window of light.

And one thing I did not expect when I looked: of the two sessions whose city is on record, neither fell inside golden hour. The Ibiza one finished an hour and a half early; the Gran Vía one, twenty minutes before it began. Good light is not only golden light, and working only in that band means giving up the whole afternoon.

What to do with this when you set a call time

The call time is not the time the window opens. If the window is 50 minutes and setting up takes 40, you need to be on location with the light metered and the frame decided before it starts. Whatever gets decided inside the window comes out of the window.

One window, one idea. Fifty minutes does not fit two looks with a change in between. It fits one done properly and, if the location allows, the jump into blue hour with the camera already in place.

The size of the source, which is what decides how hard the shadow is inside that window, is in lighting schemes in degrees.

Frequently asked questions

How much usable light is there per day?

Between 45 and 55 minutes, adding golden hour and blue hour together. In Mallorca, Ibiza and Madrid the figure is almost the same: latitude barely moves it, and the month moves it by ten minutes.

Which month has the most usable light?

December and June, with 53 to 55 minutes. The shortest is March and September, with 45 to 47. At the equinoxes the sun crosses the horizon almost vertically and gets through the band faster.

How long does a photo session actually last?

Across six productions measured from the EXIF of the original files, the median is 36 minutes of shooting, from the first frame to the last. That is camera time: it does not include travel, setting up or packing down.

Do you always have to shoot in golden hour?

No. Of the two measured sessions whose city is on record, neither fell inside golden hour and both are published. Golden light is one specific light, not the only one that works.