Portland, Oregon

Portland, Oregon

[/caption] September is looking more and more like July in the Pacific Northwest with 70 degree temperatures during the early evening. The only thing missing were the additional tourists flocking to the esplanade. However, there were enough local bikers, walkers, runners and boaters to give you the feeling that summer wasn’t ever going to end. It’s hard to imagine that wearing jeans and a short sleeve shirt was considered too much clothing at sunset. I can remember colder nights during peak summer or even colder days. I was also surprised to see so many boats on the Willamette river. Either the explosion of people moving to Portland has shown more on the river or the warm weather brought out additional locals to take advantage of the calm moving river. I’ve never actually seen someone wake boarding behind a jet ski under the Markham bridge or a paddle boarder paddling across the river. With another week of warm weather predicted, I’m assuming that it will continue to be busy along the Willamette in downtown Portland. I took this particular photo at about 6:00pm, which was about an hour before sunset. The suns glare was pretty intense during the last 2 hours of the day so I had to look for ways to prevent the glare from ruining too many of my photos. The sun was at a 90 degree angle and continued to create sun spots unless I kept the focal length well out of the sight of the sun and aimed in the opposite direction of the suns glare. I was using my Sigma 17-70mm lens and attached my UV, warming and CIR-PL filter in order to eliminate as much over exposure as possible. I made sure to use my tripod and bubble level and set the focal length at 54mm. Since the sailboat was tacking a lot I wanted to ensure that the shutter speed was pretty quick and luckily the bright sun allowed the shutter priority to stop at 1/128 second, even though the ISO was at 100 and the white balance was at -0.3. The aperture was at F-5.7, which also helped reduce the shutter speed but also allowed enough light through the shutter with too much overexposure.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *