Overcoming Exposure Time Limitations - Night Photograph

Tonight the sky looking towards Vashon and Bainbridge has some very interesting color and cloud patterns, but it is quite dark. A 15 second exposure at ASA 50 would barely produce a few lights in the sky and increasing to ASA 400 results in intolerable noise. The Canon S2 IS supports a maximum exposure of 15 seconds.

I took nine 15 second exposures without moving the camera or changing the settings and then added them together with PaintShop XI. I loaded each image into a separate layer and used the "screen" blend mode.


Here is my 2 minute 15 second exposure which captured the colorful sky very well. This was taken at 10:35 PM, about an hour and a half after sunset. The sky color is a mixture of moonlight, sodium vapor street light, mercury vapor street light, and other artificial lighting reflecting off of the clouds.