Tag Archives: OR at night

Portland, OR

[/caption] This is one of my favorite and better photos of Downtown Portland. It looks really good as a printed 8×24 panoramic printed photo since you will have to crop out a majority of the water and some of the sky in order to print at this size. Portland is a very difficult city to photograph when trying to get all of the buildings and bridges in the frame. This is especially true if you want to have the Willamette river in the foreground. You most definitely need a wide angle lens if you plan on getting the majority of the city scape in the photo. I was using my Tokina 12-24mm wide angle lens and had the focal length at 12mm. Luckily it was 10:30pm at night when I took this shot so I was able to remove my warming and CIR-PL filter which creates shadows on each of the corners of the frame. Therefore I was able to maximize the frame potential of the scene. I took this photo on 7/27/10 so the sky was void of any clouds and the air was a bit stale since the temperature in the afternoon hovered around 90 degrees. I was wanting to capture the glare and colors of the lights illuminating the night sky as well as the glare of the lights on the water so I set the camera in shutter priority and set it at 16 seconds. Again, since it was 10:30pm I increased the ISO to 400 and kept the white balance at 0. Since I wasn’t using the manual setting the aperture was at F-13. I was also using my tripod, bubble level and remote switch.