Tips for photographing a city skyline at night and at twilight.
Photographing Night Skylines
I love photographing cities and I particularly love photographing city skylines at night. There is something just mystical and magical about all those thousands of lights glittering silently in the night. The bigger the city is, of course, the more impressive the skyline and when it comes to cities like New York or Chicago, the skyline is downright breathtaking at night.
I recently had the chance to shoot the Manhattan skyline (most of what you're seeing in this shot is the financial district in lower Manhattan) from the New Jersey
shore along the edge of the Hudson River. I chose to shoot the view from New Jersey since the view
from Jersey City is quite an amazing view. There is a beautiful
boardwalk that runs along the entire waterfront in Jersey City that
makes a perfect shooting location--it's a devastatingly beautiful
vantage point. I shot this picture from a continuation of that walking path that runs through Liberty State Park--one of the state's most beautiful parks.
The trick to getting a great photo of a city skyline at night is not to shoot it at night, but rather at twilight. Depending
on which direction the skyline faces (and where you're shooting it
from) you can often get a beautiful mix of sunset colors, twilight sky
and city lights all mixed together. It's incredible. Probably the very
best time to shoot is just after the sunset and during a very brief
magic window of opportunity when the twilight sky glows an almost
turquoise blue and the city lights are beginning to come alive. This photo was made a few minutes past the peak of the sunset and
honestly I should have begun shooting about 10 minutes or so before, but even
as the sun was setting there was a driving rain falling--it was a wild
mixture of light and weather. In fact, just a few minutes before I shot this
the rain was pounding so hard that I almost abandoned the shot!
Even
on the best of weather days, this kind of beautiful twilight/sunset light only
lasts about 15-25 minutes, so you really have to be in place with your
tripod set up and your camera all ready to shoot a half an hour before sunset. Once the sun starts
to set the buildings (at least with west-facing buildings like these)
take on some spectacular colors and as the sky darkens a bit the city
lights get brighter and brighter. If you can capture the exact moment
when all of the lighting conditions are peaking, you'll get some
fantastic shots.
You'll definitely need to use a tripod to get shots like
this because you're going to need a relatively small aperture and a
correspondingly long shutter speed (this shot was made at f/10 at 2.5
seconds). At such long shutter speeds, I also suggest using either a
remote control (wireless) or the self timer, and possibly also locking
up the mirror. Even though this shot is pretty sharp, I'm not totally
satisfied with the sharpness and I'm not sure if the softness came from
the lens I was using (a Nikkor 24-120mm lens, which is not a
particularly sharp lens unfortunately) or lack of depth of field. I'm
going to go back and re-shoot this with a different lens (probably a prime lens) and I'll
probably begin shooting a bit earlier and also using a smaller aperture to get even more depth.
You can, of course,
continue to shoot after the blue has faded from the sky, but skylines just aren't as pretty with a black sky as they are with that
nice blue glow. Also, if you shoot much after dark you'll be using much
longer exposures which causes the lights in scene to blur together and
create pockets of bright glare.
Twilight is the primo time, so
just get to your location well before sunset, choose your shots and
then be ready when the worlds of sunset, twilight and city lights begin
to collide--it's an absolutely stunning mix!