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Anonymous
1. Shoot RAW if your camera can. I'll explain why under point two. If it can't, I think there's a third-party firmware patch for Powershots that let them do so.
2. Pull an Ansel Adams and meter each level of brightness in the scene seperately. If your camera has a spot meter mode, use that; if not just zoom in as far as you can on each and bullshit the rest. Set the aperture and ISO to what you need them (ISO as low as possible, aperture I'll get to in a minute) and average together the shutter speeds from your metering. Don't be afraid to move it up or down; the wonderful thing about live LCD preview is that it lets one see the exposure in advance. At very long exposures, some cameras will quit showing the difference and in that case, one has to take some test shots.
The thing with RAW is that it keeps all the brightness information, whereas JPEG just keeps part of it. With RAW, it is possible in Photoshop to bring out the hidden brightness information and equalize exposure.
3. Aperture is a mixed bag, in my experience, also using a point and shoot as my primary camera with pretty good (technical, at least) results. On one had, creative control insists upon smaller apertures sometimes. On the other, the smaller the aperture, the longer the shutter must be open, and long exposures create noise just like high ISOs do. Point and shoot cameras do have the advantage of increased depth-of-field at the same aperture as a DSLR, but it'll still have more noise than the DSLR.
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