Brooklyn Bridge – 3:30AM

Capturing colors in night photography is key to making the image pop. Colors play such a significant role in our daily visual experience. It’s a theory I apply to night photography as well.

This image of the Brooklyn Bridge was taken at 3:30AM. My areas of concentration were the buildings, the lights from the Brooklyn Bridge and the reflected colors from the East River.

Because I would be using a long exposure I used a tripod to steady the camera. By using a telephoto (70-200mm) zoom lens instead of a wide-angle lens I was able to zoom in from a distance and frame the shot with the water reflected colors in the forefront.

I chose manual mode to completely control the settings. The Metering Mode was set to Matrix. To avoid really unattractive color saturation the Picture Control was set to Standard while the Color Space was set to Adobe RGB. I chose the Auto setting for White Balance.

Although I was shooting at night, letting in too much light would have compromised the colors so I chose an Aperture of F/13 –  Shutter, 1/30 of a second and ISO 100.

Once I had my correct settings, I was able to to capture the colors.

– Camera – Nikon DSLR

– File Format – Raw