Never be lost

The various sections of the Central Library in Seattle come with big, white-on-black section markers like this one, which I assume is for the biography section.

This image is a good example of pleasing digital "noise", although it's hard to see at web resolutions. I like to "develop" my RAW files with moderate sharpening, and some chroma noise reduction (which seeks to eliminate color splotching), but I turn off luminance noise reduction, which seeks to smooth out light/dark variations. I find the luminance noise reduction makes the image fuzzier, and without it, the digital "noise" manifests as a not-unpleasant film-grain-like texture. You can see this effect in the blank, vertical shelf wall in the right half of this image, for example.

I was looking at some scans of high-speed black and white film the other day, and I think we've gotten really spoiled. The noise that modern DSLRs generate at high ISO is nothing like the big fat film grains from older high-speed film. Because it's possible to get almost supernaturally smooth images from digital cameras, people have gone on a fanatical quest to get rid of any noise in their images. If you step back from this for a minute, you can realize that sometimes the noise looks nice.

Shameless plug: the 2006 Bloggies are now in the nomination phase, through Tuesday afternoon only. You can nominate up to three blogs per category in several categories, including "best photography". If you end up being stuck for a third photoblog to nominate in the photography category, and felt the need to fill that space with something, just so as to not waste the opportunity, you could always enter "chromalark" for the name and "www.chromalark.com" as the URL, and I wouldn't be angry.