Title • cheap and cheerful

I don't know why, but no matter which English seaside resort you visit (Southend-on-Sea in this instance), you'll find stalls and shops that sell hideously tacky and cheap sunglasses. Anywhere else in the country, and you'll normally find that they are more expensive and better made. Not that that's overly interesting, but it's all I could think of to say about this shot other than that I quite like it's 'pop-art' feel.

Actually, the main reason I put this one up is that it uses some software that I haven't tried before – Noise Ninja from PicureCode. As all of you who shoot digital images will be aware (particularly those of you with compact digitals like mine), digital noise is often a problem, and nearly always ugly. Noise Ninja is a software solution for removing noise (other products include Neat Image, which I haven't tried as there isn't a Mac version) and it does seem to do a good job.

If you're interested the original noisy version of this image can be seen here. Oh, and the fact that the final version is brighter than the noisy one has nothing to do with Noise Ninja. I did some more work on the image after running Noise Ninja and didn't have time to alter the original too.