Brooklyn Bridge View
If you’re visiting NYC or a local looking to take the best photos of the Brooklyn Bridge and the massive New York skyline, there are a few helpful tips to help you create the perfect photographs.
The Brooklyn Bridge is a New York icon, annually attracting millions of visitors. On a given day, thousands walk its promenade to take everything from travel selfies and wedding portraits to fitness photos and landscape photography, with the bridge’s recognizable arches and Manhattan high-rises as the backdrop. If you’re visiting NYC or a local looking to take the best photos of the bridge and the massive New York skyline, there are a few tips to help you create the perfect shot.
Tourists photograph the Brooklyn Bridge
Capturing the Brooklyn Bridge and Lower Manhattan
Hudson River and East River bridges provide iconic skyline views from unique vantage points around New York City. But the view from the Brooklyn Bridge is arguably the best. Skyscrapers such as One World Trade Center, Frank Gehry’s 8 Spruce Street, New York City Hall, and the historic Woolworth building are just a sample of the architectural gems on display. The skyline is perfectly framed behind the Brooklyn Bridge’s famous Neo-Gothic arches, making for beautiful compositions for landscape photography, portraiture, or selfies.
Midtown and the Manhattan Bridge
The Brooklyn Bridge Promenade's center section delivers breathtaking views of Midtown Manhattan and the Manhattan Bridge. Though not quite as famous as the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge is no slouch. The blue suspension bridge is a hit with travelers as it is the focal point in the artwork for Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America. Those instantly recognizable suspension towers, and the ability to frame the Empire State Building between them, spurs millions of tourists to flock to Washington Street in the DUMBO neighborhood for selfies and other stylized travel photos.
Cars cross the Brooklyn Bridge with Manhattan Bridge in the distance
But if you want to capture the city and Manhattan Bridge from a different perspective, the view from the center of the Brooklyn Bridge is unbeatable. The Empire State Building and Manhattan Bridge are visible from this vantage. With good composition, you will easily capture a Brooklyn Bridge arch and or spans, the Manhattan Bridge, the Midtown Manhattan Skyline, and the Empire State Building in a single frame.
Facing east on the Brooklyn Bridge Promenade offers views of Downtown Brooklyn, the New York Harbor, Brooklyn Heights and Manhattan Bridge
Photoing the Brooklyn Side
An overlooked photography opportunity is snapping the eastern side of the Brooklyn Bridge. Most tourists focus on Manhattan, but, the Brooklyn side offers views of architectural gems. The contemporary steel and concrete skyscrapers in Downtown Brooklyn, classic pre-war architecture in Brooklyn Heights, DUMBO's renovated warehouses, and new stylish mid-rises are visible when facing Brooklyn. Additionally, you can capture Manhattan Bridge and the spectacular Jane’s Carousel from this viewpoint.
Photographing the Brooklyn Bridge
Across the River from Manhattan
No session is complete without photos of the Brooklyn Bridge itself. There are key areas around the bridge with incredible angles and sight lines that will make your photos pop.
Brooklyn Bridge Park is a noted spot to take pictures of Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Skyline, and the action along the East River. Walk to the waterfront area beneath Brooklyn Bridge to snap a spectacular shot of the span against the Manhattan Skyline. The DUMBO side of the park offers impressive views that incorporate Jane’s Carousel.
Nearby St. Ann’s Warehouse has a triangular garden that frames the Brooklyn Bridge arch overhead. These locations are ideal for fitness photography, travel photos, and engagement/wedding photos.
The Brooklyn Bridge overlooks St. Anne’s Warehouse in DUMBO
Walk up the Brooklyn side of the Manhattan Bridge pedestrian path for beautiful shots of the Brooklyn Bridge. Enter the pedestrian path at Jay Street and Nassau Street, then walk to the first tower. Peek your lens through the openings of the chainlink fence to capture the photograph. This angle provides unobstructed, panoramic photos of the Brooklyn Bridge, Lower Manhattan, and DUMBO, Brooklyn.
The Brooklyn Bridge, Lower Manhattan and DUMBO
Getting There
Access the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan by entering the Brooklyn Bridge Promenade at Center Street and Park Row or via the Park Row staircase. From Brooklyn, enter the promenade at Tillary and Boerum Place or via the staircase at Washington Street and Prospect Street.
If you are visiting NYC or a local needing more than a selfie at the Brooklyn Bridge, Marques Jackson Photography is here to serve your needs. Services include portraiture, travel and lifestyle photography, fitness photography, and social media photography that will capture you, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the New York skyline in their best light.
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Manhattan Bridge View
The Manhattan Bridge has been featured in countless TV shows and films. A popular photography backdrop for tourists, feature films, and social media influencers, the view from the Manhattan Bridge is also great for capturing a unique perspective of the city.
Whether in or out of focus, the Manhattan Bridge creates an incredible atmosphere.
The Brooklyn Bridge is an iconic symbol of New York. With its gothic revival architecture, it’s easy to see why millions of tourists flock to see one the larger-than-life structure. However, a little further to its north lies the Manhattan Bridge, an underrated gem and tourist attraction in its own right. The Manhattan Bridge's famous spans were immortalized in Sergio Leone’s epic Once Upon a Time in America. More recently, it has become a popular background for Instagram selfies. If you’re looking to capture the city from a unique point of view, nothing compares to photographing New York City from the Manhattan Bridge.
New York’s Manhattan Bridge from DUMBO.
Background Player
Though not as ubiquitous in pop culture as the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge is no slouch. It has been featured in countless films and television series. From the aforementioned Once Upon a Time in America, to the opening credits of TV’s Living Single, Fiat and Massimo Dutti commercials, Tom Cruise’s Oblivion and the Denzel Washington starrer The Taking of Pelham 123.
Washington Street in DUMBO, Brooklyn attracts tourists from around the globe.
Washington Street in DUMBO is arguably Brooklyn’s most famous photography spot. Each day, thousands of tourists, social media influencers, professional photographers and videographers flock to the neighborhood hoping to capture the Manhattan Bridge and the Empire State Building in the same frame. However, by not venturing onto the bridge, shutterbugs are missing out on some of the best shots of NYC and its larger-than-life structures.
Finding the Manhattan Bridge Views
The Manhattan Bridge south side walking path gives unobstructed views of several NYC landmarks.
The Manhattan Bridge offers stunning views of NYC from various angles. From the bridge’s south side walking path, Manhattan’s Financial District skyline is prominent, with clear views of towering skyscrapers such as One World Trade Center, the Woolworth Building, and City Hall. Chinatown, the Statue of Liberty, DUMBO, Jane’s Carousel, and Brooklyn Heights are also visible. You can’t photograph the Brooklyn Bridge from the Brooklyn Bridge, so the Manhattan Bridge’s south side path is your best bet for capturing the iconic site.
Northern view from the Manhattan Bridge.
The bridge's north side bike path offers a breathtaking glimpse of the seemingly endless Midtown Manhattan skyline, with views of the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the newly-minted Hudson Yards. Williamsburg Brooklyn and the Williamsburg Bridge are visible from the north side of the bridge.
For video recording, riding the subway between Brooklyn and Manhattan via the Manhattan Bridge offers a cinematic experience. Press your lens against the train windows to capture the steel spans framing sections of the city, showing the depth and breadth of the Manhattan skyline. From the gritty, colorful environs of Chinatown and the Lower East Side to the glitzy Midtown Manhattan skyscrapers, a little bit of everything is visible from this vantage point. The N/Q trains traverse the southern side of the bridge, while the B/D trains offer views from the northern side.
Whichever perspective you choose, the Manhattan Bridge view of NYC is going to make your photos and videos pop.
Graffiti and the Fence
Unlike the pristine Brooklyn Bridge, which is kept spotless and preserved for tourist consumption, the Manhattan Bridge has attitude. It’s adorned by colorful graffiti that gives it a character-filled, lived-in edge and much-needed splashes of color. From whimsical takes about life to DIY advertisements and brutally honest critiques, the graffiti gives one pause to laugh, cry, or ponder their life choices. The graffiti also photographs beautifully, providing a striking backdrop for portraiture or fitness photography.
A chain link fence flanks both dedicated biking and walking paths to prevent people from indulging in point-of-no-return impulses. Despite the protective barrier, life finds a way. At key points along the bridge paths, sections of chain link fence have been cut by industrious New Yorkers looking to give themselves, their cameras, and their phones the freedom to see the city from a different perspective. At these spots, photographers and cinematographers can take a moment to capture the city’s iconic skyline.
A recent addition to the Manhattan Skyline, One Manhattan Square stands tall beside the Manhattan Bridge.
A Busy Crossing
The Manhattan Bridge is so much more than a backdrop for movies and Instagram posts. It’s arguably the most functional of the East River crossings, offering a number of ways to travel between two of NYC’s busiest boroughs.
The blue-steel marvel houses four subway lines, four upper level and three lower level automobile lanes, and dedicated biking and walking paths. It links several unique New York neighborhoods that offer contrasting takes on city living. Chinatown — a cultural epicenter teeming with restaurants, shops, street vendors, and hordes of foot traffic – sits on the Manhattan side. The Brooklyn side sits between two bustling neighborhoods that are the poster children for gentrification: Downtown Brooklyn and DUMBO, with their high-rise office buildings, restaurants, shopping, and residential skyscrapers.
The bridge is loud in every sense of the word. Cars wizzing by and the noisy steel-on-steel of the subway train serve as a reminder of NYC’s go-go-go lifestyle. On the Manhattan Bridge, it becomes apparent that there are a dizzying number of trains traversing city as they frequently make use of the crossing. It’s so noisy that I often wonder how thick the windows are in the surrounding DUMBO high-rises and the relatively new One Manhattan Square residential skyscraper on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
If you want to capture live video from the bridge paths, remember to use a high-quality, noise-cancelling microphone with a windscreen if your subject is speaking. The thundering subway trains make it almost impossible to clearly capture voices.
Getting There
Walk the Bridge: the Brooklyn pedestrian path entry sits at the intersection of Jay Street and Nassau Street. The Manhattan side pedestrian path entrance is at the corner of Canal Street and Bowery.
Bike the Bridge: The Manhattan side bike path entrance is on Chrystie Street. The Brooklyn side bike path entry is at Jay Street and Sands Street.
Capture the view from the Subway: From Manhattan, take Brooklyn-bound N/Q trains from Canal Street station or Brooklyn-bound B/D trains at Grand Street station. From Brooklyn, take Manhattan-bound D/N trains from Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center station or Manhattan-bound B/Q trains at DeKalb Avenue station.
Drive: Enter the bridge at the intersection of Canal Street and Bowery on the Manhattan side. From Brooklyn, enter the bridge at the intersection of Flatbush Avenue Ext. and Tillary Street.
When photographing or videotaping from the Manhattan Bridge, please remember that the bridge is first and foremost a mode of transportation. Do not obstruct anyone while taking photos and videos unless you want an authentic New York greeting ;).