Long Exposure with DSC-W70

December 29, 2006 2:10 AM

Can my Sony DSC-W70 do long-exposure photos?

I got a Sony DSC-W70 for Christmas - it's a great camera, but I can't find anywhere to set an exposure time on it. Am I missing something? My manual-fu and Google-fu have both failed me!

posted by samstarling to technology (6 comments total)

it doesn't look like it... sorry
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/specs/Sony/sony_dscw70.asp
posted by joelf at 2:15 AM on December 29, 2006

As joelf's link says, the slowest shutter speed for that camera is 1 second. I wonder, though, if you were patient enough, if you could take 15 one-second exposures (a night scene, for example), and then add them up in Photoshop, to get the cumulative result of a 15-second exposure. It's a bit of work, and you might end up with a lot of noise -- I've never tried it.
posted by knave at 4:29 AM on December 29, 2006

I don't think adding together photos will do anything. You will have 15 photos, all too dark. You can't add them all together to get one lighter photo. If the light isn't there, it isn't there.
posted by The Deej at 9:28 AM on December 29, 2006

Contrary to what the Deej says, you could stack all the photos up in screen mode to get a pretty good approximation of a fifteen-second exposure. As a bonus, you'd have almost no noise whatever.
posted by notsnot at 9:58 AM on December 29, 2006

If you can get that to work, I'd really like to see the result. I could sure use it for some of my work. (Thanks notsnot.)
posted by The Deej at 11:22 AM on December 29, 2006

Here's a link discussing what notstot suggests. It looks like you don't need 15 different exposures; you can just duplicate the layer as many times as needed.
posted by The Deej at 11:25 AM on December 29, 2006