Yesterday morning I drove to Weehawken, NJ for a NJSpots Instagram meetup! The meetup was at 6am in the morning from Hamilton Park which is one of my favorite and most accessible views of New York City. Especially early in the morning you can drive and park right in front of the skyline view!
The weather was great, there were a few clouds rolling in and temperatures weren’t too cold! I set up my tripod and Nikon D7100. I used my 55-300 lens at 62 mm. I used an interval of 7 seconds since I was planning to stay through the sun rising above the skyline.
I took my first shot at 6:04 AM with a f/6.3, ISO 400, and 2 second shutter speed. I was purposefully trying to underexpose the image a little bit since I’ve been to this location before and Times Square lights up like a blinking Christmas tree in a timelapse which can be annoying unless that’s what you’re going for!
As the light changed, I ramped my ISO down to 100 and aperture to f/22 during the sequence. Those were my priorities compared to shutter speed since it was not very windy.
The sky absolutely lit up right before sunrise with some cotton candy colored skies and a nice orange hue!
The clouds were also moving really nice across the skyline which provided some great timelapse footage!
My last shot at 8:25 was ISO 100, f/20, and a 1/250th shutter speed. I waited until the sun started going above the image frame for the video.
In the end the video turned out perfect! It’s always worth getting up early for sunrise, especially with such a great community such as NJSpots!
Thanks for reading!
Brian