Category : New Hampshire

New Hampshire runs from about forty-three degrees north to forty-five, which gives it a genuinely four-season year with long generous dusks — civil twilight here runs thirty-three to thirty-five minutes against a little over twenty in Florida — and days that swing from under nine hours at the winter solstice to over fifteen in June. But the fact that decides most photographs in this state is not latitude, it is topography. A venue's schedule is set by whether it sits on high ground or low.

A hilltop or an open valley floor with no ridge to the west gets the whole of the last ninety minutes and the whole of twilight. A notch or a narrow valley — Pinkham, Franconia, the Pemigewasset — loses the first and last hours entirely, because the sun has to clear a ridge in the morning and drops behind another long before the almanac says it sets. Planning a mountain wedding on published sunrise and sunset times produces a plan that does not match the day.

Three things recur at every venue on this page. First, the species decide the shade. Red spruce, balsam fir, white pine and hemlock block almost all direct light, which makes a conifer margin the best free separation available anywhere — a metre inside the edge gives soft directional light in front and three or four stops of near-black behind. Hardwood canopy gives soft even light with a green cast, fixed by standing at the edge rather than deep inside it. And white paper birch against dark conifer is the highest-contrast natural background in New England. Second, snow is the best natural fill that exists.

It lifts the shadow under a brow to within a stop of the highlight and fools a meter by about two stops, so open up deliberately; against near-black spruce it gives the widest brightness range in this guide. With a December noon sun at twenty-two or twenty-three degrees, the whole short day rakes rather than floods, which makes a clear February afternoon the easiest light of the year here — the reverse of what most people assume. Third, the autumn runs downhill and southward.

The high country and the far north turn from the third week of September, the middle mountains in the first week of October, central New Hampshire in the second, and the Merrimack valley and the seacoast in the second and third — with the palette shifting from the mountains' sugar-maple reds to the south's oak and hickory bronzes, which hold on the trees for longer. The window to avoid everywhere is mid-March to mid-April: mud season has no good version of itself outdoors, which is exactly when the state's barns, theatres and historic interiors earn their keep.