Bay Street Building

I've been playing with a trick for low-light hand-held photography. In situations in which I can't take a long enough exposure because of the shakiness of my hands, I take several shorter underexposed shots in burst mode, then additively combine them in Photoshop (aligning them when I do so). As with any signal-averaging method, this improves the signal to noise ratio, resulting in an image that's less grainy than any of the starting images. This also works to let me stop down more than I would have been able to otherwise.

This is a composite of six photos shot in rapid succession of a building on Bay Street in Toronto. Each photo was a 1/10th of a second exposure at f/5.0 and ISO 1600, shot hand-held with a Canon Rebel XTi and a 17-85 mm image-stabilized zoom lens zoomed to 41 mm.