"Candlelight" not all that great, in practice

So I was playing around in the dark the other night, trying to see how much light I could actually capture with my Olympus Stylus 600. It seems that on "Candlelight" mode, the picture is far more grainy then I'd like, although if you can get past that you can see I was trying to get the light and shadow interplay and all that.

Since that didn't work out at all, I wanted to try a couple shots with the standard "portrait" mode, just with the flash turned off. There is just enough light in the pictures to make some of the objects in the background stand out, but certainly not as much as it actually looked like. This whole attempt was a little disappointing since I couldn't capture what I wanted, but I guess that is part of the down side of using a regular point and shoot camera for things like this.

The first picture below I do like though, and makes for a fairly nice background image for my desktop, since it is all black where I have all of my icons sitting around.

Take Two

Well, this was the image I thought I was posting, but now that I look at it I can't decide which of the two I like more. Clearly in my head I mashed the 2 shots together, since I wrote about the dictionary (only shown in the first) and the leather bound "Tales of the Alhambra" stuck between 2 paperbacks (which is in this one). Maybe I should get some sleep.

Posting Again

Sometimes you just happen to notice interesting things around the house. I like the textures in this one, even though I don't do the greatest job of capturing it. The leather bound between the paperbacks, and the wear lines in the spine are cool. You can tell I've read Hamlet, and more often than I've used the American Heritage Dictionary. Now, does that mean I've read Hamlet a ton, or just never bother to look up anything?