The skating ring

Trying to figure out how to spend a free Friday, I went to check out the freshly set-up open air ice-skating ring at the Millennium park. Needless to say, my heavy artillery couldn't be left behind. I have shot a lot of pictures, some of which will be presented later, under a more appropriate topic.
Quite a few people were enjoying themselves over there, but not enough for the ring to be crowded. Unfortunately, it was slowly getting dark, and I had to maintain decent shutter speeds, the only thing left to do was to increase the sensor sensitivity - therefore some of the shots are a little grainy. Of course, ladies showed up, too. These two were my favourite:
Millennium park is the area with probably the most photos in Chicago, and some cameras that can be seen there make mine look like a harmless toy. :-) Of course, paying five grand for a body is quite outside of my league for the years to come. As an upside, people didn't get upset when staring into my dark tube with diameter of 77 mm.
People of all skills could be found over there, ranging from ones fully focused on maintaining upright position, to ones zooming through the ring with skills I haven't seen live before.
Oh, and this girl reminded me of my dear Bobor for some reason. It's not that look so much alike, but the general posture and feel was just very close. :-)
That's it for tonight, coming up under the "photo" label are city shots and photos of other photographs. Thanks for clicking your way here, and stay tuned! :-)

I love my camera! :-D (A shout of pure, childish joy.)

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PS: This is how it looks when the noise gets as bad as possible, at ISO boosted to 3200, with all noise reduction turned off, and after dark. (Much darker than it would seem from the photo, simply winter light at five in the afternoon, plus some lousy city lights.) Still, I am amazed that it is possible to get a shot at 1/125 of a second, even though the quality suffers dearly. Reducing the noise would even improve it a lot.