The Greatest Show on Earth for 10 Minutes

I'm a night person.  Check out any of my posts and you'll usually find that they were created late in the evening.  Although I've not spent more than a week at a stretch in California, I seem to have embraced their time zone.  It's not that I have a beef against early risers, it's just that my biorhythm is set for night.

Well, I've been trying to buck that trend for the last week or two.  I've been working on getting myself up and out of the comfort of my bed to film the sunrise over Manhattan.  

Like running or bike riding, once I'm out there, it pretty feels good and if the conditions are right the images  can be quite spectacular.   Ok, but I have to get out there at 5:00 am to appreciate it.  Ugh!

Strangely enough, the best conditions are not always a perfectly clear day.  In fact a clear blue sky can be a bit boring, photographically.  Instead, add some puffy clouds or or brilliant red sky of an approaching weather system and things might begin to happen, but often, only for a very short period of time.

A few days ago, I arrived at a location that I had previously scouted and in the few minutes it took for me to mount and power up the camera, I had already missed the most brilliant part of the display.   Although I researched the schedule of the sun and moon, I had not taken into consideration that finding parking could be a slight issue.  Even at 5:30 in the morning

From experience, I have found that I need to begin setting up in the dark, just prior to a period designated as "Civilian Twilight", which is usually around a half hour to 40 minutes before the sun actually peaks above the horizon.

One of the key elements to capturing a decent sunrise or sunset with your video camera or still camera for that matter, is having control over the brightest areas of your image.  Now in a skyline, that's usually (but not always) the sky.

In my situation, filming the sun rising up from behind Manhattan, the sky is always the brightest part.  To balance this I use something called a graduated filter, or grad filter for short.   As the name implies, the filter, which is a piece of glass in front of the camera lens, gradually gets darker, allowing less light to get through to the camera's sensor.   If you put the dark part over the sky, then it will darken just that.

Sometimes, if the sun is reflecting on the Hudson River, I need to use a second filter, upside down, with the dark area at the bottom of the image.  This way, I can reduce the amount of light coming from both the sky and the water in the foreground, leaving the city in the clear part in between.

This technique can often solve a myriad of problems and not only on the skyline.  I have used graduated filters to knock down the reflections on buildings, sidewalks and any other part of an image that needs to be evened out or even intentionally darkened.

Once you get into the edit room, it's often too late to fix the problem.  There are "digital grads" available as plug-ins for most edit systems, but if the bright section of the image is too bright, their is rarely much you can do to recover the detail that you have lost.

The strength of a graduated filters is conveniently measured in the same way as Neutral Density filters.

.3 = one stop less light
.6 = two stops less light
.9 = three stops less light
1.2 = four stops less light

A good set of filters is quite an investment.  I've purchased my filters from  a company called Formatt and I've found their quality control to be quite good and their prices a bit more reasonable than some other companies.  But, even at a reasonable price, they're not cheap, so gather them slowly.

Aside form all the technical stuff, just standing out there along the river with a skyline the looks like OZ looming in the distance is a beautiful experience.  The noise of traffic and construction will not begin for  another hour and it is just a magical time, especially now in the late summer.  It will be a bit more challenging at 15 degrees in the winter, but for now it's perfect.

A few runners, a fisherman and myself appear to be the only folks witnessing a giant ocean liner, pursued by two small tug boats,  slowly cruising into port.   The sight is breathtaking!

By seven o'clock, the sun is high above the buildings and the show is pretty much over until the following day.  Time for a cup of tea as I sit down to review the images.

Not every morning is golden, but everyone is different and with a little bit of luck there'll be a cloud or two and something great to shoot.  I can pretty much guarantee that the images will be one of a kind.
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