Cheese market Alkmaar - K-70

I took my K-70 with the 16-85mm lens out on a little bicycle ride into the centre of the Dutch town of Alkmaar where the faous cheese market is located. Due to the limitations of bicycle travel, I brought an ultralight 4-section tripod (Redged TST-423K) with me for some longish exposures towards the end of the blue hour.

This is the famous spire of the "Weighing Tower" or "Waagtoren" as it's called in Dutch. There's a mess of different kinds of illumination going on both in the foreground as well as in the floodlighting on the tower itself. I took 3 bracketed exposures but I ended up using the middle of the -2, 0, +2 series and pulled up the shadows in Darktable during raw conversion a bit (apart from some geometric corrections) after which the image transferred into Gimp for a bit of sharpening.

I duplicated the whole image into a new layer for sharpening with GMIC's "Freaky details" filter at 40% opacity and then proceeded to select and remove the evenly-colored portions of the top layer to avoid excessive noise in the sky due to the sharpening.

What continues to excite me about the K-70 is the ease and flexibility of the articulated screen, used here in live-view with the focusing square moved onto the tower itself. Of course, as I will show in following posts, the performance of the K-70 hand-held at higher ISO ranges is also something which, coming from the K-5 series, continues to amaze me.

The difference is clearly visible. Processing of the PEF raw file is as with the previous example.

Nice work Mike.