Bring the noise.

On Monday, I came into the office to find a big, beautiful bouquet of flowers on my desk. This isn't an unusual occurrence and I'd like to say that's because I'm so delightful and charming that people just can't refrain from sending me flowers and gifts, but I'd be lying.

The truth is, fairly often a hotel guest will check out and leave flowers behind to avoid struggling with them during travel. These forgotten flowers always seem to end up on my desk. Again, this isn't a gesture of kindness, my desk just happens to be the collect-all of forgotten crap. And from there, the trash.

The left-behind-flowers were still in beautiful condition and, even though I'd normally send them to the dump (I need space to work, okay?), there were two vibrant flowers that made me immediately wish for my macro lens.

So at the end of the day, I carried this huge bouquet through the hotel, up five flights of stairs, and over two freeways just so I could take the following pictures. (Everything ends up a photography subject these days.)



This was the first flower that caught my attention. I love those vivid colors.



This rose was the other. Unfortunately, as I was mucking about in Photoshop, I noticed something.

Noise. And lots of it. Take a look for yourself.



This is the same image as above, but zoomed into 100%. Yikes.

Sure enough, I had accidentally left my ISO on a setting of 500. That might not sound too bad, except Nikon would prefer it if I never used an ISO setting higher than 100 and becomes darn prickly if I try.

At this point, I was done taking pictures. The Vikings game was on and the Husband was going a little insane watching and I just wanted to relax. See, I put the movie Oliver! in on Sunday, determined to finally watch it after three weeks of letting it sit on my dining room table (it's one of the Academy Award winners). Well, I fell asleep in the middle of the movie and slept for, oh, three hours. Of course, that meant I could not, for the life of me, fall asleep that night. Sleep finally came sometime around two a.m. thus the reason I've felt sleep deprived the last three days.

I almost decided to just let it go. Who cares if the pictures are a little noisy? No one is going to see them zoomed in that close anyway! Just let it go!

But I'm an anal-retentive perfectionist with a touch of OCD and once an idea gets it's claws in me, there's no loosening it's grasp until I fix it. So, with a heavy sigh of resignation, I took some more pictures.

I think it was worth it. These are a couple of my favorites from the bunch...