Taking Riverfront Skyline Photographs | DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY DAILY

Photographing Skylines

I’ve seen a lot of skyline photography over the years, and wanted to offer my suggestions for any type of night shooting you’d like to try. With digital cameras, results don’t come any easier than with film, you still need to have great digital photography technique. When shooting at night, you can be sure you’ll be shooting with slower shutter speeds, and if you’re dealing with the weather, then you have a whole other number of issues to deal with!

This past summer, I met a handful of my local photographer buddies for a trip down to the riverfront. We made an outing of it, since we had to take the tunnel underneath the Detroit River in order to get to the Canadian side to shoot the Detroit skyline. Don’t forget your passport! After a dinner of ribs, diet coke, desert (a must on photography outings), we made our way over to the riverfront.

First lesson: Shoot your skylines during the business week! We met on a Saturday night, and many of the Downtown Detroit buildings were not too lit up. Lesson learned for the next outing! We really didn’t realize it until we got there! Additionally, we were faced with some stiff winds, the 30mph kind that plays havoc on our digital cameras and tripods.

Here are the suggestions that I came up with that night, as well as members of our group:

Use a Sturdy Tripod: Flimsy tripods will just introduce more vibration to your digital camera.

Use a Remote Shutter Release or Self Timer: Another technique you’ll hear about from me in many articles, is to use a remote shutter release. Most digital camera manufacturers will have one thats available for under $50 for your digital SLR model. If you’re shooting with a compact digital camera, use the self timer capability. Both these techniques will help reduce vibration introduced by your little fingers pressing the shutter button. In low light shooting situations, this is a must in order to get sharp images!

Hang Your Camera Bag: Yep, hang your camera bag from the center post of your tripod. Good tripods come with a hook on the bottom of the center post, just for that purpose. The extra weight of your camera bag really does help steady the tripod in windy conditions.

As far as shooting technique, I’ll let you know how I got this shot… Simple. Given that the skyline of Detroit was over a mile away from where I was set up, I set my camera to Aperture Priority, set the Aperture to f/5.6, the sharpest part of my lens, and let the camera calculate the shutter speed. At ISO 800 (needed this to speed up the shutter speed), the camera took this shot at a shutter speed of .6 of a second.