I shot this one yesterday right after reading your post. iso1600, shot cRAW, in camera high iso noise reduction turned off. Processed in lightroom, default NR settings were luminance NR 0, color NR 25. I corrected the perspective distortion (wide angle lens) in photoshop and then just resized for web.



The one thing that is a tell tale sign of high iso shots, since now the noise in newer cameras is so well controled, is the reduction in dynamic range. However well this image is exposed, there's a lot of clipping in the shadows under the desk, and the papers are blown out, and I couldn't really recover any detail from the raw file. I'd need a tripod to try the shot again at a low iso to see how much detail could have been recoverd in the highlights and shadows.

In most conditions, my camera floats in the 400-800 iso range, if it's bright I'll roll it down to the 100 - 200 range, and if it's dark, I'll run it all the way up to 2000 or more, 3200 gets a bit grainy for my tastes, and I'm not that into hard core noise reduction processing. Takes too much time.

BM