So I took my camera up in the hills last night

[kyzen]

First off, I'm using a Canon Powershot a710 - It's not a DSLR, or anything too fancy, however I know it can take better pictures than what I got out of it.

I took the camera and a tripod up into the hills where I live around sunset. I got some fun pictures using the auto focus setting, then decided to see what I could do with the manual focus. I managed a few decent shots with ISO 80 speed, and quick exposures, to get really dark mountains with blue skies, but anything I tried getting a brighter picture of turned out grainy.

So help my newbish arse out here - what am I doing wrong? What should I be doing?

I tried all sorts of ISO combinations and exposure lengths, and so many pictures turned out grainy. I can post an example in about an hour and a half, but knowing the speed at which this forum moves, I thought I'd get the question out sooner.

 

[GrJohnso]

Can you give us a couple sample shots to see what kind of grain you are seeing? Most likely it's a form of "noise" (as it's refered to in the digital world these days) that's a result from either too high of an ISO setting, or just a long exposure without good in camera noise reduction.

Either way, you can't change what your camera is capable of, but you can change how the resulting image looks by doing some post processing with a noise reduction tool like Noise Ninja, or other Photoshop plugins...

I'll let one of the resident post processing experts give their advice, as I haven't spent much time in this area...

 

[kyzen]

Ok, I'll upload a few images when I get home in about an hour

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

You may be forced to use noise reduction software. I remember using my old Olympus C-750 P&S with ISO 50 and long exposures and resulting in noisy images. Even at low ISO, noise can develop quite readily when you do long exposures with P&S sensors. Neat Image does noise reduction.