Yesterday evening I drove to the Manasquan Reservoir in New Jersey. This spot had been on my go-to list for a while now and I was hoping for a nice sunset. The scene ws epic as I walked up to the lake with a Great Heron posing right in front of the sun for me. The bird was looking for food and enjoying the sunset!
I quickly set up my tripod and camera while trying to be as noise free as possible. I had to use my 55-300 mm zoom lens to get a closer view of the bird. The reflections on the water were amazing (bird included). I set my interval for 6 seconds since I knew the bird might fly away at any point. Typically I use an interval of 10 seconds for a sunset but I was not planning on staying for a day-to-night timelapse so faster is better. Retrospectively even 4-5 seconds would have still worked!
I was shooting in manual exposure at 78 mm, ISO 800, and started with 1/200 at f/11. I bumped up my ISO a bit to get a faster exposure so the bird didn’t come off as blurry in the timelapse. At 6 second intervals I ended up shooting neat 280 photos ending at 1/13 second exposure. The bird went away as the sun started to finally go down but I got it in a few seconds of video. I edited the video with Adobe Lightroom and LRTimelapse since I was changing shutter speed during the sequence.
Overall, this was a really cool and peaceful area. I will definitely go back in the future to explore a bit more!