Canon G9 Long exposures

[Jake T.]

Lately, I've been shooting long exposures at night to get the affect of day. I'm amazed at how well my G9 handles it until...the exposure is over and you get the telltale "busy" symbol.
Its very agitating when that perfect whisp of cloud is floating across the moon and you're waiting for a picture you took 30sec ago to get written to the card.

I have a Sandisk Ultra II. Any suggestions for a card that would actually show a difference in write speed?

Thankyou

[pfogle]

you'd have to turn off the long-exposure noise reduction, if the G9 lets you do that. I'm not sure that's a good idea, you'd have to experiment and see how the images hold up.

[Dorman]

Even DSLR's take time to write a long exposure image to the card, just about the same amount of time as it shutter is open for. Turning off long exposure noise reduction and having a fast card may help, but it will take time. That's just the way it is.

[pfogle]

when you use the long exposure noise reduction, the camera takes a second exposure *with the shutter closed* and then subtracts the 'dark frame' from the normal exposure. The idea is that the dark frame will have noise that is statistically similar to the real exposure and by subtracting it, you end up with less noise in the final image. It works pretty well, but means that time between exposures is doubled.

So cutting out the NR will halve your waiting time. You can compensate by shooting RAW and using some noise reduction when converting.

[GordonSBuck]

Dark frame subtraction cannot be turned off in the G9.