The photographers’ “Golden Hours” can contain a marvelously vivid glow in these latitudes during March. It’s especially stunning when the sun finds the flaxen cat tails and fields that have not yet awakened; that’s when gold gilds gold.
Most photography texts generally describe the Golden Hours as the last hour of sunlight before sunset and first hour before sunrise, give or take a varying amount of time. Better texts describe the phenomenon in relation to charts of the sun’s position above or below the horizon in degrees. The bottom line for us: the Golden Hours are longer and more intense in winter.
During the in-between month of March, we can experience the transition of light awakening life. The sunlight still needs to travel a longer, lower, winterish path through the atmosphere to us, during which the blue and violet light gets scattered more and virtually filtered out, leaving mostly red and orange light to reach our squinting landscapes. (Brooklin, Maine)