3 ms·

Integrating over a longer time to get more accurate light measurements of the a scene has been a principal feature of photography. You need to slow down the shu

Integrating over a longer time to get more accurate light measurements of the a scene has been a principal feature of photography. You need to slow down the shutter and open up the aperture in dark conditions. Combining multiple exposures is not significantly different from a single longer exposure, except the key innovation of combining motion data and digital image stabilization which allows smartphones to approximate longer exposures without the need of a tripod.

tonyarkles 1y ago
I agree with you wholeheartedly and just want to add one more aspect to this: it also allows you do handle the case where the subject is moving slowly relative to the camera. Easy example is taking long exposures of the moon from a tripod. If you just open the shutter for 30 seconds the moon itself is going to move enough to cause motion blur; if instead you take a series of much faster photos and use image processing techniques to stack the subject (instead of just naively stacking all of the pixels 1:1) you can get much better results.
- magicalhippo 1y ago
  For bright stuff like the moon, it's my understanding the best way is take really high-speed video, hundreds of frames per second, then pick out the frames which has the least amount of atmospheric distortion and stack those. So not only can you compensate for unwanted motion of the camera rig, but also for external factors like the atmosphere. For faint deep-sky objects, IIRC you really do want long exposures, to overcome sensor noise. At least the comparisons I've seen using same total integration time, a few long exposures had much more detail and color compared to lots of short exposures. That said, lots of short exposures might be all you can do if you're limited by equipment or such, and is certainly way better than nothing.

3 ms·

Integrating over a longer time to get more accurate light measurements of the a scene has been a principal feature of photography. You need to slow down the shu

by picture 1y ago

tonyarkles 1y ago
I agree with you wholeheartedly and just want to add one more aspect to this: it also allows you do handle the case where the subject is moving slowly relative to the camera. Easy example is taking long exposures of the moon from a tripod. If you just open the shutter for 30 seconds the moon itself is going to move enough to cause motion blur; if instead you take a series of much faster photos and use image processing techniques to stack the subject (instead of just naively stacking all of the pixels 1:1) you can get much better results.
- magicalhippo 1y ago
  For bright stuff like the moon, it's my understanding the best way is take really high-speed video, hundreds of frames per second, then pick out the frames which has the least amount of atmospheric distortion and stack those. So not only can you compensate for unwanted motion of the camera rig, but also for external factors like the atmosphere. For faint deep-sky objects, IIRC you really do want long exposures, to overcome sensor noise. At least the comparisons I've seen using same total integration time, a few long exposures had much more detail and color compared to lots of short exposures. That said, lots of short exposures might be all you can do if you're limited by equipment or such, and is certainly way better than nothing.