Remnants

In June, 2008 my wife and I were camping at Living Forest RV park in Nanaimo. I took this on a walk along the Nanaimo River. Obviously there was once a mill of some kind along here because there are many leftover remnants of something that was here including these support beams. You can see another funny remnant here.

This was taken just before the premature birth of my third grandson that cut short our camping trip. You can see he's come a long way since his incubator days here and here.

Specs on this shot: f13, 1/1000 sec, ISO 1600 (I forgot to adjust the ISO back down after taking some low light shots), focal length 70 mm with my 70-200 lens. Until I purchased the Topaz Labs filters, this was quite noisy because of the high ISO (the higher the ISO the more digital noise you will get.) The two filters I bought are Denoise and Adjust. Denoise is obvious and made a real difference in this photo and then I used the Adjust filter for the look that I've become enamored of.

Another side note about ISO. You can get away with a higher ISO with a digital SLR than you can with the point and shoot cameras. Most of the smaller sensor cameras (ie. non-SLRs) get noisy real fast as you move up the ISO ladder. You should do some tests yourselves but you probably shouldn't go much above 200. Most of the newer cameras have auto ISO that will ramp the ISO up in low light situations. The amount of noise that is acceptable depends upon how important the shot is. With my Canon 30D, ISO 400 is usually quite acceptable, 800 less so (especially on bright sunny days, but that's another mistake), and 1600 definitely needs some noise reduction work.