Blue Hour Site, behind the scenes

What is all about?

I have a website, it is called Blue Hour Site. This site is able to help by calculating the best time frame for taking stunning blue hour pictures. Blue hour refers to the time after the sun goes below the horizon and the sky goes into deep blue for a while. Below you can see a photo took during this time:

Blue hour at Budapest, Hungary

So where it began?

The idea came in 2008 when I was in Dresden, Germany. It was only a one night stay and I wanted to shoot some blue hour photos. I was not sure about when this time frame starts so during the day I looked for some nice vantage points in the city to get prepared but later that day at the hotel when I realized it is getting dark I did not have enough time to get back to my spots, it was totally dark when I was ready to take the photos. So I missed my one and only opportunity to take some photos there. I was not happy and as a developer I decided to create some code that tells me when blue hour will start on a given day and location. Later I thought more on this idea and got a new idea to create a website to this, it will be a good help to other photographers as well and also we living in the internet era, so why not doing this online.

Later that year I was ready with the website, it was much simpler than the current site, but it already worked well and it was accurate enough to put it online.

I sent the URL to my friends, shared it on web2 sites, wrote about it in photography forums and watched my statistics. More and more visitors came from different part of the world, but the traffic was really low during these weeks/months... I had days with only 1-2 visits.

The big boom

This was my big luck, maybe the biggest ever. I got an e-mail from The Kim Komando Show about they selected my website as the Cool Site of the Day and they said I should prepare for huge amount of visitors on that day. I got prepared and watched server statistics big time. And first visitors arrived, arrived and arrived. I got nearly 30,000 visitors during this time, mostly from the US. I also got a lot of positive feedback and some ideas too from these people. It was huge, amazing, awesome. Of course the miracle ended after two days but my average daily visitors was much better than before.

The impact of The Kim Komando Show

Today

During the years I implemented a lot of things and also a made completely new website based on the popular CMS system, Drupal. The code behind the blue hour calculation is improved too, I got many feedback from you guys, which helped me a lot to increase the accuracy and find bugs too.
I received a lot of questions about taking stunning blue hour photos, so I decided to start writing some articles about the basics of this type of photography, I did not get too much feedback but the number of questions are decreased so I guess it worth the time creating it.
Visitor count increased nicely over the time, thanks to the lot of sharing on twitter, facebook and other web2 services and also special thanks who blogged about the site. I have many new ideas about future functions for the site, a bit early to write about but I will definitely share these ideas to see how you like it.

Today (blue) compared to past (orange)

I thought it would be nice to have a little community around the site where photographers can share blue hour photos with each other so I made a Flickr group and as a motivation I placed six random flickr photos on the home page of the blue hour site. It started growing fast, much faster than I imagined. Currently the group has more than 600 members and more than 2400 photos. I check the photos on a weekly basis and always amazed about the places, quality and composition. I can say the average quality of these photos is much higher than most public photo groups, I really proud of these guys who shared their photos.

Click on the image above to see these amazing photos!

I hope you guys enjoyed reading some story about the idea behind bluehoursite.com and next time I'll write about the BlueHourApp for iPhone.

Leave a comment if you have any questions or wanna read more about blue hour photography or related things.