3200 ISO on 30d

IMG_0282f
Originally uploaded by dehmystic.

I did some experimenting Saturday night at Brandt's Cafe. The only wide angle lens I have is the slow 18-55 kit lens that came with the Rebel XT. My hope was that by using the 3200 ISO setting on the 30d I could get some properly exposed images that would have acceptable noise. WRONG! I was still unable to get the exposure close enough to keep the noise down. As a result I had to apply A LOT of noise reduction which made the photos useless for anything but web. Not only was the noise bad, but setting the 18-55 to it's largest aperture of 3.5 makes the image extremely soft. I think my next purchase is going to be a Tamron 17-50 f/2.8. I have found that converting very noisy images to B&W makes them much more presentable. Below is the original JPG conversion to illustrate the difference. To really appreciate what I am saying you have to look at the larger size of both of these images.