I took the Spark along with me on one of my photo trips again, which is why I opted for the Spark in the first place as it fits in my camera bag.  This trip was a 25 hour straight, 650 miles in total roadtrip to the Moray Firth, Scotland.  I've shot this location before, many times, but never in these conditions.  I waited for 3 hours on the beach before I could even see the lighthouse due to a very thick sea fog.  Once it cleared though, I could see the fog bow (formed in the same way as a rainbow, only with fog particles rather than rain) forming on the ground, but the sun angle was to high in the sky still to get it on the big camera....so up the Spark went, and here's the result...

Rattray Head fog bow by Martin Steele, on Flickr

Great shot.  All things come to those who wait.  Thanks for sharing.

Beautiful shot. Two thumbs up.

Fantastic  - well worth your wait.  And such a blue sky in Scotland, that's lucky too.

awesome shot!!

Thank you folks   It was a glorious day for drone flying

great shots .. thanks for sharing

A really good shot! At first glance I mused about your centered composition, but came to conclusion, that it fits the situation best. It would be nice to learn more about your post processing workflow, as you seem to have acquired a wonderful tonality and not a hint of the shift towards to cyan I all too often saw in pictures from Spark. Did you use any filters? Your flickr stream is amazing, btw :-)

Sparky_17 Posted at 2018-5-28 09:20
great shots .. thanks for sharing

Thank you

Sparkassenkunde Posted at 2018-5-28 09:48
A really good shot! At first glance I mused about your centered composition, but came to conclusion, that it fits the situation best. It would be nice to learn more about your post processing workflow, as you seem to have acquired a wonderful tonality and not a hint of the shift towards to cyan I all too often saw in pictures from Spark. Did you use any filters? Your flickr stream is amazing, btw :-)

Thank you for the kind words

A centered composition is my favourite for this location, and I know it's not to everyones taste, but I like a central comp in a lot of situations.

Post processing-wise....firstly it's a 3 image bracketed shot, loaded into Lightroom and merged using the Lightroom photo merge.  

After this, it was basic adjustments (being a jpeg you can't do much without adding digital artefacts) a slight reduction in both exposure and highlights, a slight increase in shadows and for me the most important slider, an increase in whites.  The increase in whites, I feel gives the image a much more crisp look.

Then it's into Niksoft Colour EFEX for pro contrast adjustment, where I add a some dynamic contrast.  Then it's run through noise reduction (Niksoft Define 2) and then finally slightly sharpened using Niksoft RAW presharpener.

It's a quick 5 minute process that I've found works fine on the Spark JPEG.  I don't touch anything colour-wise, as I find the Spark colours quite punchy as they are, and touching vibrance or saturation gives colour noise quite quickly.  There's no filters used, although I am tempted to get some ND filters for the Spark just to slow the shutter down a touch for seascapes.

I hope that's of some use to you

Thanks for your comprehensive reply! As it seems, your work flow is pretty much the same to mine. I only spare the denoising and use the sharpening function in Light room more often than the NIK sharpening tools. Your proceeding strengthens my confidence in the way I usually treat my pictures.

Sparkassenkunde Posted at 2018-5-28 12:05
Thanks for your comprehensive reply! As it seems, your work flow is pretty much the same to mine. I only spare the denoising and use the sharpening function in Light room more often than the NIK sharpening tools. Your proceeding strengthens my confidence in the way I usually treat my pictures.

It's pretty much the same workflow I use on my Sony a7rii shots, but just remembering that I can't push and pull sliders so much with it just being a jpeg file.

I find the jpegs are really quite nice though and need very little tweaking other than just to tidy them up a little bit if the lighting is less than ideal.

I took a quick shot at home of my town in 'normal' lighting conditions, so not bright, not dark, not sunny and all the image needed really was a touch of sharpening.  It produces some lovely files.  It takes getting used to 12mp images again after woking with my Sony files, but hey, that's part of the fun, working to the limitations

Superb picture!

Beautiful shot. The lighting is exceptional. Love it

Magnificent image. Well done indeed.
I really havent done much in the way of photography with my spark yet (still new to learning and gaining confidence in it). But i think i will be using the bracket feature quite a lot and merging in photoshop. Its such a shame that they cant produce a RAW image, but i suppose thats simply a cost constraint.

Wow that is a really nice shot. Really looks cool. Thank you for sharing.

Sidd

Thank you folks

Cool, thanks for sharing!