Yesterday afternoon we took a short trip into New York City. The first place we visited was the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan. The weather for the day was partly cloudy and actually ended up raining in the evening so not many timelapse opportunities. But when we got to the WTC my brother pointed out a cool view looking straight up towards the tower. When you get close to the tower it looks like a triangle pointing straight upwards. I decided to set my tripod with my camera pointing straight towards the top. The angle was tough to set-up looking straight upwards but I have a level bubble on my camera that helps establish the horizons. I had to use my 18.0-55.0 mm lens at 36 mm since there were a lot of trees near the base of the building and I wanted a composition with just the tower and nothing else in the image.
The sun was out a bit with lots of clouds moving quickly. I noticed the reflection on the tower with the clouds and thought it would be a really cool timelapse. Since the clouds were moving pretty quick I decided to use a 2 second interval using my 18.0 – 55.0 mm f/3.5-5.6 lens at 36 mm. My other camera settings were ISO 100 and f/16 to have the sharpest image in Aperture Priority with -1.0 EV. The shutter speed ended up being around 1/320 but I use aperture priority when there are a lot of clouds because the sunlight can change a lot as the clouds move through the scene. I took 170 photos which took only a little bit longer than 5 minutes. The results turned out pretty cool with the reflections!
