Chasing Light: From a Balcony View to the Dolomites
The impulse to chase the golden hour is universal. We share stories of dropping everything for the light, from a local sunrise to a Dolomites sunset.
It’s a funny thing, that feeling. The one where you see the light start to do something interesting and a switch flips in your brain. Suddenly, whatever you were doing—making dinner, heading home from the gym, planning the next day’s hike—becomes secondary. The only thing that matters is getting the camera and getting there, wherever 'there' needs to be.
It’s an impulse that doesn’t care about geography. We’ve felt it ten minutes from home and ten thousand kilometres away.
One morning, just after finishing up at the gym, the sky was full of high, wispy cloud. It’s the sort of texture that can either do absolutely nothing or turn into something special. A coin toss, really. But on the off-chance it paid off, we grabbed the gear and made a beeline for Greenpoint Reserve. It’s a reliable spot overlooking the Georges River, and thankfully, the gamble worked. The sun broke through and lit everything up in that brief, intense gold.
Sometimes, though, the chase is much shorter. When we were living in Dubai, the 'chase' was a two-metre walk from the lounge to the balcony. The view was always there, a permanent fixture of the city skyline. You can get complacent with a view like that, almost forgetting to look at it. But then the sun would dip, the haze would catch the light just so, and the whole city would change colour. The impulse was the same: stop everything, grab the camera.
The Same Feeling, Different Mountains
Then there are the times you plan for. The big trips, where finding good light is part of the whole point. We spent some time hiking through the Italian Dolomites, a place that seems engineered in a lab to look good in photos. We spent days on the trails there, surrounded by jagged limestone peaks and valleys that just fall away.
But even with all that planning, it still comes down to the same spontaneous moment. You can be tired, hungry, and ready to call it a day, but then you see the clouds rolling into the peaks and the sun starting to drop below them. The light turns, the mist catches fire, and suddenly you’re not tired anymore. You’re just a person with a camera watching the sky fall apart in the best possible way.
The feeling is identical to the one you get seeing good clouds over a local river. It’s just the scale that’s different. It’s a reminder that you don’t always need a plane ticket to find these moments; you just need to be paying attention.
At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about. That universal, undeniable pull to just drop it all and chase the light, whether it’s across the hall or across the continent.