First try at this, with my current camera

[Gservo]

Early Morning over Manhattan
What could i have done better?

Camera:	Nikon D90 Lens: Sigma 70.0-300.0 mm f/4.0-5.6
Exposure:	30
Aperture:	f/22.0
Focal Length:	70 mm
ISO Speed:	400
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	No Flash

[kirbinster]

Why did you pick f/22? Usually you don't want to shoot with such a small lens opening.

[dcclark]

I like the view of the city -- like you were drawing the city using only negative space (which is an interesting effect).

There is a lot of completely empty, dark space at the bottom. Think of this: if you were painting this scene, would you have bothered to put all of that black paint all over the bottom? Does it add anything to the photo? If there's nothing to see there (no reflections in water, perhaps), then it would help a lot to crop it out.

Also, yes, f/22 is an odd aperture to choose. If you had taken your ISO down to 100 or 200, you could have been at a larger aperture and perhaps avoided a little fuzziness as a result.

[Gservo]

kirbinster, i was trying to get as much detail as possible, but in hind site, you are correct, i should of not gone past f/8 DOH'

Thanks DC Clark, i now see the error of my ways

[Rehesan]

I would tried to find some reflection in the water an avoid all that empty black space. Also you mentioned this capture is early morning, so I assume this is way ahead of sunrise because of the darkness, so, I would have waited until the sunrise and would tried to captured a little red-orange sky light.

Technically, I agree the previous comments: the aperture is so little, so there is no way to let pass enough light so gets dark and in that way maybe you lost some interesting detail. I would set the ISO to 200, chose a more wide aperture and find right shutter speed to properly expose the photo, or if I would had a tripod I would set a little longer shutter speed, the key is to capture a little more light.

[EOBeav]

There's some potential here. If you're going to make sure of the negative space, then I would leave out so much of the foreground and focus in tighter on the main buildings.

[larryb52]

My thoughts are I like the high contrast of the buildings (spots of lights against a black background) however I also agree with the comments on the large amount of black in the foreground. I would rather see the dark area above the city by putting the buildings closer to the bottom.