What a Wonderful Monday

Today was a really really nice day in West Michigan. Just a gorgeous spring day with temps in the upper 60's. While I had been playing a little catch up on the office work there were two wheels in the garage that were calling my name to be uncovered.

Ok, so we did not go up to the Mackinaw Bridge... We did go out for a nice late afternoon cruise (65 mi) and stopped in Saugatuck, MI for an early dinner. I ˙ad only started the bike once over t˙e winter and the volts were down to about 9VDC. I gave it a try anyhow and it fired on the first turn over. So I sat there soaking in the potato... potato... potato beat that the Harley-Davidson V-Twin engine puts out.

My daughter and husband were in over the weekend for a wedding of a good friend of ours so we were able to enjoy some time with them as well. As far as the wedding I have a new interest in attending these events. It is called watch and learn form the sidelines. We are not into Weddings at the moment but I have no doubt we will go in that direction in the next couple of years.

The photographer was shooting with a 5D and what looked like a 30D or possibly a 40D as a second body. I think he had a 40-70 L lens and a 70-200 L on the smaller body which would make sense to get the farther reach with the 200 and 1.6 cropped sensor. 

Without going into the gory details I was asked to get some shots of the bride for someone who could not attend the ceremony. As a good friend of course I agreed. The problem was I did not want to bring my gear and look like I was ripping off the guy hired to do the wedding. So all I could really do was bring my G9 with me and look like an over interested fan of the couple. This would be my stealth approach to getting some shots.

* * *  WARNING  * * *   WARNING  * * *  WARNING  * * *

Somewhere in the G9 manual must be a statement about not shooting in low light with this camera. I will offer Canon the following scale of acceptable low light performance:

ISO    Noise Ratio     Esthetic Rating

100        NR     Cant See Anything

200        10%     Still way to dark

400        40%      Can make out images if exposed long 

                               enough

800        60%      Really kind of sucky in noise

1600      ???      You might just as well shoot through 

                               a screen

Now for the good news. I jump online and surf over to Noise Ninja by Picture Code and download their version 2.1.1 and install it as a plug-in to PS but I also picked up the stand alone version so I would not have to fire up CS3 just to hack at a jpeg file.

It would have been really ugly if I had to tweak a whole bunch of these photos but with a little on the fly action I was able to automate most of the process. What was really cool thou is that when run in CS3 as a filter it can be used as a Smart Filter. Click on the Noise Ninja sub-layer and you jump right back into the plug-in. Really Sweat!

The image about is the shot from the camera if you can see the noise. After the magic of Noise Ninja the image below was revealed.

I just gotta tell-ya, this is a really fine product. Anyone who has a point and shoot and tries to get low light pictures to turn our is in dire need of this application. It was like $79 bucks for license   codes for the plug-in and stand alone version. This really is amazing. I have not figured it out yet but I know there are downloadable profiles for various cameras which would lead on to believe this could be a much more automated system than I had done today.

Here is the link again if you are interested: Noise Ninja

With all that said and done It's time for some sleep.

Cya...Doug