Sunrise from the Brooklyn Bridge

Over the long weekend I got up early on Sunday morning to see the sunrise on the east side of Manhattan. Compared to the last time I took sunrise photos it was pleasantly warm, even though the sun came up at 5:30 it was 21 degrees Celsius! I headed out to the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, I had been planning to see how the sun lit up the office buildings in Lower Manhattan but the view over the Manhattan Bridge turned out to be the main attraction.

High finance

Pretty soon after starting to take photos I realised there was a problem that I hadn't anticipated: because of the cars passing over the bridge it shakes almost continuously, which made the tripod I had brought along useless. I took this photo with the tripod and it turned out blurry, so objectively it's a failure, but I'm still pleased with the way it turned out. (The Statue of Liberty is on the lower left.)

First glimpse

Once the sun started coming up I realised I should have paid attention to the weather forecast, since it was much cloudier than I'd been hoping for (it rained later in the day). Last time I observed that zoomed shots generally turned out better than wide-angle ones, so this time I tried to keep the number of elements in the frame small and focus in on the most colourful bit of the sky. I also reduced the exposure to darken the sky and reduce the foreground to a silhouette. This photo is from 5:47.

Full glory

At 6:05 I got an unobstructed shot of the sun rising.

Threatening clouds

Taken at 6:16, the sun is about to go behind the clouds and end the show.