The Battello, Jersey City: The Light Through the Day

You are on the west bank. That is the whole advantage.

The single most useful fact about photographing on the Jersey City waterfront is one that most people get backwards, and once it is understood the whole day falls into place.

You are on the west bank of the Hudson. Manhattan is to the east. Which means that at the end of the day, when the sun is low behind you, it is shining directly onto the west-facing walls of every building across the water.

The skyline is front-lit at sunset. Not silhouetted — lit, warm, with the faces of the towers going gold while the sky behind them deepens toward blue.

That is the opposite of what a photographer standing in Manhattan gets, and it is the reason the New Jersey side of the harbour is worth more to a wedding photographer than the New York side. From Battery Park or the South Street piers you are looking west into the sun at a silhouette; from here you are looking east at a lit facade with the good sky behind it. There is no trick required and no compromise to make.

Battello occupies a glass building on the Jersey City waterfront directly on the water, with the Hudson immediately outside and the skyline across it, and it is modern throughout — floor-to-ceiling glazing, clean lines, and a view that is the entire photographic argument.

So the light here is not a property of the room. It is a property of the hour, the aspect and the weather, and it runs through the day in a very legible sequence.

Two numbers set the frame. Jersey City sits at about forty and a half degrees north, which gives a midsummer noon sun near seventy-three degrees, a midwinter noon sun near twenty-six, and civil twilight of about thirty minutes in midsummer — of which the genuinely useful balance point, where the skyline lights and the sky are within a stop of each other, runs twelve to fifteen minutes.

And the Hudson here is something like a mile and a half wide, which is close to ideal for a skyline. Much closer and the buildings become a wall with no depth; much further and they become a texture. At this distance the towers separate, the layers read, and a long lens has something to compress.

Hour by hour, it goes as follows.

The Battello at a glance

Where	A glass waterfront venue on the Jersey City side of the Hudson
The advantage	West bank, so the skyline is front-lit at sunset rather than silhouetted
The distance	About a mile and a half of water — close to ideal for a skyline
The window	Twelve to fifteen usable minutes at the balance point
Ask first	Whether there is outdoor deck access, and the wind policy

Morning and the middle of the day

Sunrise here is the dramatic one and the difficult one, and it is worth knowing about even though almost no wedding uses it.

The sun comes up behind Manhattan, which means the skyline is a hard silhouette against a bright sky and the water in front of it is a sheet of glare. That is a strong graphic image and it is impossible to combine with a face — anything in the room is four or five stops under the exterior. If a couple is getting ready early on a clear morning, take one frame of the silhouette from the window and then close the sheers.

Through the morning, the sun swings south and up and the skyline goes from silhouette to flatly front-lit-from-the-side, and the room stops taking direct light quite quickly. An east-facing glass wall gets hard low sun for the first hour or two and then nothing but skylight for the rest of the day.

That is genuinely convenient. From mid-morning onward the interior is lit by a very large area of open sky and by bounce off the water, which is soft, even, directional in the broad sense, and completely stable. A subject side-on to the glass at a metre and a half is well lit at ten, at noon and at three, with no change in character. Preparation coverage can be scheduled around the wedding rather than around the sun.

Two corrections to apply consistently. The light is cool, because open sky is a cool source and because modern glazing is coated to reject heat, which shifts transmitted daylight cooler and often slightly green. Those compound, so interiors here photograph bluer than the eye remembers. Warm the whole block rather than frame by frame, and set a white balance for the position you are shooting from, because a subject at the glass and one five metres back are lit by measurably different colour.

And there is a specific bounce here that does not exist at an inland venue: the water. A mile and a half of moving water outside an east-facing wall is a huge, low, slightly cool reflector, and it throws light upward into a face from below. That fills eye sockets and softens a jaw for free, and it is the reverse of the usual high-floor problem where there is no ground bounce at all. Use it — stand people close enough to the glass to be in it.

The middle of the day is the hardest hour for the view rather than for the room. A midsummer noon sun at about seventy-three degrees puts flat top light on the skyline, so the towers lose their modelling and read as pale grey shapes, and summer haze in this metro area is at its worst at the same time. A wide frame of Manhattan at one in the afternoon in July is a disappointing photograph and no technique improves it.

So the instruction for the middle of a summer day is to stop photographing the view and photograph the room, the people and the water instead. The water at midday is at its most reflective and a long lens across it picks up specular sparkle that reads well behind a subject.

In winter the whole thing inverts and improves. A midwinter noon sun near twenty-six degrees rakes the skyline from the south all day, so the towers keep modelling and shadow from eleven until three, and the cold dry air is far clearer than summer air — which matters enormously here, because the skyline is a mile and a half away and haze is what softens it. The clearest skyline views of the year are in January and February, and a photographer who only knows this venue in summer has not seen it at its best.

One general note about reflections in the glass. A glass wall with a bright exterior and dimmer interior reflects the room back at you, so a wide frame that includes the window contains a ghost of the tables, the stands and possibly you. Move off the glass axis, get close to the pane, or compose the reflection deliberately. A polariser helps less than photographers hope, because you are nearly perpendicular to the surface — though it does help on the water itself, cutting surface glare and deepening the river.

Late afternoon: when the skyline lights up

From about ninety minutes before sunset the venue becomes what it was built to be, and the sequence is predictable enough to schedule to the minute.

As the sun drops behind you in the west, it begins to strike the west-facing walls across the river at an increasingly low angle. The effect builds slowly and then arrives all at once: the towers go from grey to warm, then to gold, and because the light is raking almost horizontally the modelling on them is at its strongest of the day. Buildings that read as flat slabs at noon acquire depth and edge.

The sky behind them, meanwhile, is doing the opposite — darkening toward the east as the earth’s shadow rises. So you have a warm lit subject against a cooling background, which is the most flattering combination any landscape offers, and it happens without you doing anything.

That is the frame. Couple in the foreground, skyline lit behind them, sky deepening above. Make it repeatedly over about twenty minutes as the colour changes, because the version at the start and the version at the end are different photographs and it is hard to know in advance which the couple will prefer.

Light the couple for it. At any exposure that keeps the lit skyline correct, ambient on this side of the river will not expose a face — you are standing in the shadow of the land behind you while the towers are still in sun. One small warmed source at low power, close, is all it takes, and it must be set up before the light arrives rather than during it.

Which buildings get lit depends on the date, and this is the planning point most people miss. At about forty and a half degrees north the sun’s setting azimuth swings something like sixty degrees across the year — well north of west in late June, well south of west in late December. So the angle at which the light rakes across the skyline changes substantially by season, and so does which parts of it are lit and which are shaded by their neighbours. A position and a composition that worked in July will be different in January. Check the azimuth for the actual date.

After the sun sets, do not stop. The ten minutes after sunset are when the towers’ own lighting comes up while the sky still holds a graduated blue, and that is the balance point — where the skyline lights and the sky are within a stop of each other so both hold detail in a single frame. At this latitude civil twilight runs about thirty minutes in midsummer and the genuinely useful part is twelve to fifteen of those.

Twelve to fifteen minutes is enough for two positions if both are decided in advance and you walk rather than discuss. Use them.

The water in that window is the thing that makes these frames better than the equivalent from a rooftop. The Hudson is a tidal estuary here, so the surface is usually moving and often genuinely choppy, which means it scatters rather than mirrors — the skyline’s lights become a long shimmering vertical column on the water rather than a clean inverted image. Get the camera low and that column runs the full depth of the frame. It is the strongest compositional element available and it costs nothing but kneeling down.

If the evening is still and the water flattens, you get a true reflection instead, which is rarer and cleaner. Both are good. Neither can be arranged.

One thing to establish well before the date: whether there is outdoor deck or terrace access and what its wind situation is. A waterfront edge on an open harbour is exposed, and a westerly across a mile and a half of water arrives with force — a veil there is a two-person job and a lightstand needs sandbagging. Ask also whether the outdoor space is shared and what a wedding actually gets in writing.

If there is no outdoor access, the whole sequence above still works through the glass. It is slightly less good — reflections to manage and a pane between you and the air — and it is entirely serviceable. Press the lens to the glass, kill the room lights behind you for the night frames, and it is close to indistinguishable.

After dark, the harbour, and the year

Once the sky has gone, the skyline is a field of lit windows against black and the exposure problem changes completely.

The city looks bright and it is not. At an exposure that renders those windows correctly, a person in the foreground is entirely unlit, so every night frame with people in it is a two-exposure proposition: the city on ambient at a second or two on a tripod, and the couple on your own light. Kill every light behind you or its reflection will sit on top of the city in the glass.

That is an old copy-stand technique and it works exactly as well here as it does at forty storeys. Press the lens close to the pane, use a dark cloth against the glass if reflections persist, and the window effectively disappears.

The harbour has traffic and it is worth watching for. Ferries cross regularly, tugs and barges work the river, and helicopters run the corridor. A vessel passing behind a subject during the balance point is a strong and very specific frame, and ferries run frequently enough to plan on rather than hope for. Helicopters are a noise problem for a ceremony rather than a photographic one, and worth mentioning to a couple considering an outdoor vow exchange on the deck.

The interiors after dark in a venue like this are lit by a designed scheme, usually warm, low and from above. Ceiling downlights put shadows in eye sockets, so a bounced light is generally needed even in a room that looks beautifully lit to the eye. Pale ceilings at normal heights take a bounce extremely efficiently — two lights into opposite corners will lift a whole room by a stop and a half invisibly — so check the ceiling colour and height on arrival and the reception lights itself.

Now the year, which at a venue whose subject is a mile and a half away is mostly a question of air clarity.

Winter is the best season for the view and it is not close. Cold dry air over the harbour is far more transparent than summer air, so the skyline resolves with genuine detail — individual windows, structural edges, the separation between towers — rather than dissolving into a pale grey mass. Add a low sun that rakes the buildings from the south through the whole middle of the day, and January and February give the sharpest and most modelled skyline of the year.

The cost is the schedule. Sunset in late December is before half past four, which puts the balance point before five, during cocktails rather than after dinner. That has to be a named item on the timeline or it passes while the room is being seated. It also means any outdoor element is brief and cold on an exposed waterfront.

Summer is the reverse. The days are long — sunset after eight in late June, with the balance point near half past eight, which falls comfortably inside a reception — and the outdoor deck is genuinely usable. But the humidity in this metro area produces real haze, and a hazy skyline a mile and a half off is a soft grey silhouette rather than a subject. July and August wide frames of Manhattan from here are routinely disappointing, and the honest thing to tell a couple is that the skyline will look better in their February engagement photographs than in their August wedding ones.

There is a partial fix, which is to shoot longer and tighter. Haze scales with distance, so a two-hundred-millimetre frame of one building group carries far less of it than a twenty-four-millimetre frame of the whole waterfront. In summer, compose tight.

Spring and autumn are the compromises and both are good. Late April and May give clearing air, comfortable temperatures and lengthening evenings. Late September into early November is the strongest shoulder: the humidity drops out, the air clears markedly, sunset lands around six so the balance point is at a civil hour, and the light stays low enough that the skyline is modelled through the whole afternoon.

Two weather notes specific to an exposed harbour edge. Wind here is a first-order planning consideration rather than an afterthought, because there is a mile and a half of open water to the east and nothing to the west but a low city — a breezy day on this deck is a different event from a breezy day in a courtyard. And storms move through this metro quickly in summer, with the half hour afterwards being the best light of the year: washed air so the skyline finally resolves, wet decking reflecting the sky, and a low sun under a broken ceiling. If a cell goes through at six, do not pack.

The one instruction that covers the whole year: you are on the west bank, the light comes to the skyline rather than from it, and the twelve to fifteen minutes after sunset are the most valuable block in the day. Put them on the timeline with a name against them.

More frames from The Battello

The Battello wedding photography: common questions

Why is the New Jersey side better than the Manhattan side?

Because you are on the west bank, so Manhattan is to the east. At the end of the day the low sun is behind you, shining onto the west-facing walls of every tower across the water — the skyline is front-lit and warm while the sky behind it deepens to blue. From Manhattan looking the other way you are shooting into the sun at a silhouette. There is no trick required; the geography does it.

How long is the good window?

Twelve to fifteen genuinely usable minutes, inside a civil twilight of about thirty at this latitude. That is the balance point, where the towers’ own lighting has come up and the sky still holds a graduated blue, so both record in one frame. It is enough for two positions if both are decided in advance and you walk rather than discuss. Before that there is a longer build of about twenty minutes as the low sun rakes the buildings from grey to gold — shoot through it, because the start and the end are different photographs.

Do you need to bring lights?

Yes, for anything outdoors at the end of the day. Once the sun is low you are standing in the land’s shadow while the towers are still in sun, so at any exposure that keeps the skyline correct a face is unlit. One small warmed source at low power, close, set up before the light arrives rather than during it. Indoors after dark the same applies with a tripod: the city on ambient at a second or two, the couple on your light, and every room light behind you switched off so its reflection does not sit on the glass.

Does the season matter much?

More than at almost any venue in this library, because the subject is a mile and a half away and haze is what softens it. Cold dry winter air is far more transparent, so January and February give the sharpest, most modelled skyline of the year — with a low sun raking the buildings from the south all through the middle of the day. Summer humidity produces genuine haze and July wide frames of Manhattan from here are routinely disappointing. The honest thing to tell a couple is that the skyline will look better in their February engagement photographs than in their August wedding ones.

Is there anything to do about summer haze?

Shoot longer and tighter. Haze scales with distance through the air, so a two-hundred-millimetre frame of one building group carries far less of it than a wide frame of the whole waterfront. Also watch for the half hour after a summer storm clears, which washes the air and gives the best skyline of the season along with wet decking reflecting the sky — if a cell goes through at six, do not pack.

What should we ask the venue?

Whether there is outdoor deck or terrace access, what a wedding actually gets there in writing, and what the wind situation is. A waterfront edge with a mile and a half of open water to the east is genuinely exposed — a westerly arrives with force, a veil becomes a two-person job and lightstands need sandbagging. Also worth knowing: helicopters run the river corridor, which is a noise consideration for an outdoor ceremony rather than a photographic one.

More Jersey City, NJ venue guides

We are writing a photographer’s guide to every venue we would happily shoot in Jersey City, NJ. Here are three more, plus the full index:

• The Hudson House, Jersey City: One Frame, and How It Is Made
• The Liberty House, Jersey City: The Venue’s Own Logic
• The Maritime Parc, Jersey City: Suits and Does Not Suit

All Jersey City, NJ →

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