Some nights you just get lucky with the sunset!
Last night I went to Red Hook in Brooklyn to take some photos at Pier 44. The pier this weekend was going to be a perfect spot with the sunset angle for the Statue of Liberty. I drove there, left about 6 pm and got there around 730 (there was a shut down bridge and an accident on the way…so glad I left early). Anyways, I could tell right away that the night was going to be epic for the sunset. The sky was already orange about 30-45 minutes before sunset!
I started my timelapse with the intention of staying until nightfall because it was such a beautiful night. I had to use my 70-300 mm kit lens to get the right composition. I wanted the Statue of Liberty to clearly be the subject of the photo but as you can see the pier is still a bit away from the island. I ended up being at 155 mm with my Nikon D7100 (crop sensor). I was in manual exposure with f/13 and ISO 400.
My first photos were at 1/320 seconds (my last photos were at 5 second shutter speeds) since I was shooting right into the sun and I didn’t change the exposure for quite a bit until the sun started going down more. I was using an 8 second interval and ended up staying for 800+ photos so close to two hours of shooting. The timelapse ended up EPIC and PERFECT with the colors and sun doing down below the horizon. The sun even aligned with the American flag near the horizon which was real cool.
After the sun started going down I was decreasing my shutter speed pretty much every 10 photos. I try and change the shutter speed at minimum 10 photos because I will ultimately need to smooth the transitions in LRTimelapse and Lightroom and the more changes there are it becomes tougher and tougher to have smooth videos. The 10 photo rule works pretty nicely in my opinion with an 8-12 second interval which is typical for my sunset timelapse.
The amount of boats going back and forth was my only concern but it looked ok in the video. I was afraid with the 8 second interval that they would look like flashes of light but they moved around quite a bit. As night fell, the Statue of Liberty started to light up which was awesome.
Overall, I am incredibly pleased with the video and results and feel extremely lucky! One of my best timelapses for sure!
Thanks for reading! Let me know if you have any questions
Brian