Joy of Watercolor in Port Townsend

Teresa has been taking a watercolor class so I took the opportunity to photograph "artists at work" at her last class.

There were two minor technical challenges in these photos. The interior shots were taken without flash, at ISO 800. Using ISO 800 left a lot of noise in the images. I used Paint Shop Pro 9's Digital Camera Noise Reduction utility to remove the noise. This tool is better than the one supplied with Photoshop CS2, although no noise removal technique is perfect. Unlike most days recently, the sky was mostly clear so we had harsh direct, mid-day sun for the plein air photographs. On most photos, I used fill flash to match shaded foreground images better to well lit backgrounds and to compensate partially for the color difference between direct sun and shade. Without a helper, I didn't want to try to use a reflector or diffuser to modify the light. Maybe next time....