Early morning onwards

Well I managed to drag myself out of bed this morning at 6am to catch the sunrise. I managed to fill up a 512Mb CF card remarkably quickly, and cursed myself for leaving the new 1Gb card I'd bought at home. So out of 47 or so photos, one of which you can see here, 6 or so are now fully processed and printed. I'm quite pleased with the results - these are not easy lighting conditions for a camera to cope with. Having said that, I spent most of the time in manual mode, using the histogram to check exposures. Unfortunately, when I first set up, I tried to get a light meter reading at 400ASA. I realised it wasn't going to work, so switched to manual... but forgot to change ISO. So I ended up with everything at 400. I have to say there is a lot of noise in deep shadow at 400 - a very unpleasant mottling. Of course, I also completely forgot noise reduction mode. I've now programmed in a Reset with mirror lock up and noise reduction for twilight conditions. Also, I processed everything using Adobe Camera Raw 2.1 - possibly I would get better results with Olympus Studio, but this is a test still to be done. In parallel to all this I'm working on a comprehensive web site update, reprocessing some 200 photos, scanning new ones, and updating scripts - and I managed to fit in a second, late afternoon photo session. Maybe I'll have another go at sunrises tomorrow...