When I was making the exposure for this image I knew that it would be too noisy to be a literal image because of the low light situation and the Canon G9's inability to handle high ISOs and/or low light conditions without gross noise. (here's the rhetorical quiz) What does Ed do when faced with a situation where trying to minimize a potential flaw (noise in this case) would be futile? A: Ed exaggerates the flaw to make it obvious and thus intentional. In this image I allowed the noise and bumped the ISO higher to exaggerate it. Then, after some optimizing and metadata (filling in the blanks) in Photoshop Lightroom 2, I jumped to Photoshop CS3 to desaturate (color noise just looks too funky to me) and then add some texture and contrast play using a high pass filter a few times. In this display of the image, the texture isn't noticeable, but it is in a print or full screen display.

Peace