I have shot the New York City skyline for years, usually from Brooklyn, near the Brooklyn Bridge. But I had not shot the west side of the Brooklyn Bridge in more than nine years, so when I did finally visit it with some workshop students, I was quick to notice several new (to me, at least) phrases and words in the railings along the riverfront. Why not use a word or two in much the same way I use foreground flowers in landscapes? I soon caught sight of the word GORGEOUS and knew immediately that this was where I wanted to set up. With my Nikon D3X and 16–35mm lens at the 19mm focal length, I framed GORGEOUS in the foreground with the city beyond. This is classic “storytelling” aperture stuff, so f/22 was my obvious choice for a deep depth of field. I manually set the focus to 3 feet on the distance scale, and all that remained was to take a meter reading off the dusky sky. According to my meter, and with an ISO of 100, my shutter speed indicated 4 seconds as a correct exposure for the ambient light. (No filters here of any kind.)

Without benefit of my flash, however, no one would have been able to see GORGEOUS, so out came my Nikon SB-900 flash set in manual exposure mode (as always!). With the flash set at full power (1/1), and the aperture dial on the back of my flash set to f/22, I discovered that the flash-to-subject distance needed to be about 7 feet for a correct exposure. (I also placed an amber gel on the flash to warm up the blue-gray railing.) I fired the camera and, over the course of that 4-second exposure, the ambient light was recorded with the flash, set for rear curtain sync, firing at the end of the exposure. And voilà, here is the result!

Nikon D3X with 16–35mm lens at 19mm, f/22 for 4 seconds, ISO 100