Recently I made another trip to Chanticleer Point in the Columbia Gorge to photograph the sunset on Vista House. I am looking for a specific image with dramatic clouds behind the Vista House lit by the warm light of sunset. On this recent trip I got some pretty good images but still not what I wanted. There wasn’t enough clouds and there was too much smoke from wildfires in the region.

I have rarely done night photography, but since I stuck around a little while for the rising Harvest Moon, I thought I’d stick around a little longer to get some night images of Vista House. I shot using Live View and exposure simulation with the histogram. This made shooting the night images quite easy up until the necessary shutter speeds exceeded 30 seconds. When the required shutter speeds exceeded 30 seconds, I changed the aperture to get the histogram I needed. Then I recalculated what shutter speed I needed to get back to f/16. I then used a watch to time the exposure manually. I nailed the exposures.

These night shots were awesome. As you can see, they have a great purple glow to them. The house itself is glowing from within with its incandescent lights and traffic on I84 shows as great streaks of light.

I now want to go back for some starfield shots over the Vista House. Problem is since the night in these photos, clear nights have been quite rare.

Take a closer look at these Columbia Gorge photos.