Our good friend Kenan turned the big 4-O (or as her son calls it “30-10″) recently and her husband Pete put together a great surprise party for her downtown at the Crystal Ballroom. It was an 80′s themed party, but since my short Ocean Pacific shorts and my neon colored Izod shirts were at the cleaner’s, I went dressed in my typical outfit circa 2009. Jeans and a black shirt. How original. Well, at least there were a few others who went with the 09 theme so I didn’t feel too out of place. Lots of great 80′s get ups though.

The photo above includes Kelly, Kenan (the guest of honor!), Susan & of course, Chris. I didn’t bring my flash with me, though I really should have. Not sure what I was thinking. Actually, I was thinking I didn’t want to carry around a big huge flash. So I had my trusty Canon 5D Mark II and my 50mm f/1.8. Fortunately, the lens was a f/1.8 so it lets in a decent amount of light. And fortunately, the Canon 5D Mark II can crank up the ISO for those dark, you should have brought  your flash moments. And even more fortunately, there is a great piece of software called Adobe Photoshop along with a handful of plug-ins including ones made where I work. Here’s a shot of the original file before I started in on it with Photoshop.

That's what I call low light. I really should have had my flash.

• Exposure: 1/30 sec @ f/1.8
• ISO 6400
• Focal Length 50mm
• Lens: Canon EF 50mm f/1.8
• Camera: Canon 5D Mark II

But, with a little help from Lightroom, I bumped up the exposure, adjusted the white balance and increased the fill light a bit. Next off to Photoshop where I did most of the heavy lifting. Ran it through a noise reduction filter then adjusted the exposure a bit more with an adjustment layer. I added a cooling photo filter effect as well to adjust the white balance some more then used the Hollywood Glow effect from PhotoTools 2 Professional Edition. I still had to do some work on the table cloth as there was a lot of noise there but it wasn’t anything a little color fill layer set to color blend mode couldn’t fix using a layer mask. If you saw the full size image, you’d still see a bunch of noise (not much you can do with it given the conditions) but you’ll most likely never see the full size file.

Enough of that. Here are the rest of the pictures.