[/caption] Downtown Portland during the summer months offers some great opportunities to take photos with very long exposures since the air is usually still and the city lights are strewn perfectly along the waterfront. The Hawthorne bridge also offers great opportunities with the steal covered road creating an awesome patchwork of stenciling along its beams. I took this picture on 7/27/10 and it was about 10:40pm so the sun was completely gone with nothing but the dark night sky to work with. I made sure to remove my CIR-PL and warming filter since I didn’t want any grainy color in the background or along the lights. However, I wasn’t immune from the little red dots that seemed to run rampant along the photo. The Focal length was at 24mm so I would just crop out the dots in the background and foreground. I set the shutter speed to 30 seconds, which caused the dots to appear. Each light shines like a well lit lantern and really creates a dynamic personality and highlights just how spectacular Portland is. I made sure to use my tripod, bubble level and remote switch and continued to check the histogram for the proper exposure. The camera was set at Shutter/Priority mode and I had the ISO at 400 and the white balance at -0.3 so the aperture was automatically set at F-22 due to the low light.