The Journal

Golden Hour

Light at this angle lasts eleven minutes. Patience is just another word for faith in the moment that has not arrived yet.


Every photographer knows the mathematics of golden hour without ever doing the arithmetic. The body learns it instead: a tension in the chest around 4:40 pm in November, a particular alertness.

We were on the roof of a building in Al Quoz. The city spread below us like a circuit board still being soldered. Everything was becoming something else.

In eleven minutes of usable light I made forty-three frames. Thirty-nine of them were wrong in ways that will teach me something later. Four of them were right in ways I still cannot fully explain.

Patience is just another word for faith in the moment that has not arrived yet.