Yesterday evening I drove to Lambertville, New Jersey to check out a sunset on the Delaware River. Lambertville, NJ sits right on the river and has a walkable bridge to the Pennsylvania side of the river towards New Hope, PA. I’ve been waiting to go to this area for a bit and saw the sun was setting on pretty close to direct line with the bridge. The sunset was at 5:22 pm so I started shooting about 445 PM. The Pennsylvania-New Jersey border is right in the middle of the river. The bridge has a line on the walkway that shows the border. In fact, if you notice, there are a lot of people stopping a bit further up in the bridge at a line in the ground – this is the border on the bridge.
The sun was still above the horizon and hills when I started. The bridge was a bit shaky with a lot of car traffic and foot traffic but I set up my tripod near one of the bases in the river to prevent as much shaking as possible. I was using an 8 second interval with manual exposure and auto white balance at ISO 400 and f/11 using my 18-55 mm lens at 29 mm. I was also using a gradient Cokin filter to keep the sky a bit darker as the colors changed.
I ramped my shutter speed manually as the light changed. I ended up shooting 415 shots with an ending exposure of 0.8 seconds. I was a bit worried about the shakiness of the bridge as it got darker, so I tried to keep my shutter speed below 1 second to minimize any blurriness. The sky and clouds were really nice for a sunset and did turn pink for about 5 minutes after the sun set over the horizon.
Overall, the video turned out really great with a pretty cool composition and nice colors in the sky! I will definitely have to come back to the area to shoot the reverse (a sunrise from Pennsylvania). Lots of nice people on the bridge for sure, I had a few people stop and ask about my camera. Also a special shut-out to Charles if you’re reading this who stopped and took the time to chat a bit about photography and film!
Hope you enjoy. Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks for reading!
Brian