Nikon Color my World: Borders

After shooting many photos under high-ISO conditions, I noticed that noise seemed to be more noticeable in dark and underexposed areas of the photo. Does this mean that if sufficient light is given to the darker parts of the scene, noise may become less noticeable?

I therefore set the D70's exposure compensation to +1.0EV (aka exposing to the right) and went to Borders at Wheelock Place to take some indoor scenes under available light conditions, shooting without flash and hand-held.

The results of my short experiment were somewhat inconclusive: noise was still noticeable in the darker areas of the photo despite the +1.0EV. Could it be that the D70's auto-exposure mode made some adjustment to over-ride and offset to some degree the +1.0EV exposure compensation, as some on the Net have suggested? If this were so it would make the D70's exposure compensation feature of limited value, wouldn't it? More experiments on exposure needed to be made to see if this is the case.

Generally, I think setting compensation to +1.0EV was a bad idea. This was because most of the time I encountered indoor situations where bright halogen and/or flourescent lighting was used to brighten up the interior. This resulted in washed out highlights that could not be recovered in pp.

Worse, I forgot all about the +1.0EV setting when I walked out of the building and continued with some street shooting, examples of which are shown in the pictures below. Really bad idea!

D70, kit lens@22mm, 1/60s@f/5.6, iso560, +1.0EV, AWB -3