After a follow up visit to Hamilton Park and the Weehauken Cliffs overlooking the New York City skyline, we’ve decided to abandon our original idea of assigning individual photographers to one of four groups.

Instead, we’re providing you with the following site map with designated shooting areas. While each location is quite similar, each location offers a slightly different shooting perspective. Each location will also allow you key in on a specific combination of buildings and structures.

As you will note, we have designated 4 shooting locations. They are within easy walking distance of each other and each area has quite adequate room for a multiple number of photographers. I’m sure you’ll all want to change locations several times during the day/night trying different lenses and focal lengths as well as vertical and horizontal shots.

We will station a tour leader at each one of the shooting locations to help with advice and council as well as suggestions on how to achieve the results that you want.

Your tour leaders are:

Malcolm Kahn

Boris Hardoin

Yishai Shampir

and

Martin Joffe

Our introductory workshop, starting at 4:00 p.m. will be held at Shooting Location # 1. This spot offers the most convenient space for an on-site workshop. It also provides some wonderful views of the New York Sky Line.

The walkway that we’ll be shooting from has a wrought iron fence that won’t inhibit your shooting and will stop you from falling over the cliff. In some instances the tops of trees will be in your foreground. You can easily shoot around them. In addition, if you’re shooting at 200mm and longer, you won’t even see them in your frame as you’ll be shooting above them.

I shot a series of images there, the other day, using a 24 – 70 mm lens and didn’t have much trouble avoiding the tree tops. I used a 70 – 200mm lens with a 2x extender last night which means that I shooting at a focal length of 400mm. Didn’t encounter any problems what-so-ever.

One word of caution. As you’ll most likely be shooting at slow speeds to 20 to 30 seconds, small water craft can enter and go through your frame. So, before releasing your shutter, get into the habit of looking at what’s coming down or going up the river before tripping the shutter. Worst case scenario, the boat will go thru your frame and create a streak of colorful lights. Actually, it looks pretty cool. Because of the slow shutter speed, you’ll tend to see only the lights and not the boat.

As we’ve said before, we’ll have deli wraps on hand along with bottled water and an assortment of flavored ice teas.

Since there aren’t any rest room facilities or portable bathrooms at our shooting location, we’ll provide a shuttle service during the day/evening to take people to and from rest room facilities. The shuttle service will not be continual, it will run at specific times to be determined. We suggest that you use a restroom before getting to Hamilton Park and limit your fluid intake.

Finally, I went to Hamilton Park late yesterday afternoon/evening and took a few test shoots. While they can’t compare with Malcolm’s images, they’ll give you a good idea of what you will see and what you can expect.

All of the following images were shot with a 70 – 200 mm lens with a 2x extender. I used an aperture of f8 or f6.7 and an ISO of 100. Most of my shutter speeds were between 20 and 30 seconds.

I’ll see you all in about 24 hours.

Martin Joffe