The Fuji HS10 & Rainbows.

As most of us know, the only real weak spot of the HS10 (IMHO) is its low light or low contrast shooting. This can make things problematic when trying to shoot something that has a small amount of intrinsic brightness and even less contrast area. Rainbows against a dark cloudy sky are often difficult to shoot because of this.

-67 Ev for settling down highlights
In the clouds

There is a way to do so if you have the time to set the camera up prior to the event. As with a lot of things photographic the moment can leave you scrambling. A short while earlier to the arrival of the rainbow I had been shooting a cloud formation in the distance that had some nice lighting playing across their tops. About an hour later the weather had changed and we were getting light rain. It happens here quite regularly on the mountain.

-33Ev setting was still too dark

So when taking the first few images the shots were very dark. It was several shots later before I realized that though I had been using my favorite "P" mode settings for the cloud shots I hadn't changed the Ev setting from -67Ev to -33Ev which is normal for my settings. In actuality I had to drop the Ev further to 0.00Ev to get the right color and highlighting.
Once I had this problem sorted the next one was to figure out how to get the most area of rainbow into shot. I had my big lenshood on at the time so this was causing some vignetting, but more importantly the rainbow was so close that it filled the entire frame and more. To get parts of it to fill as much of the shot as possible necessitated holding the camera at about 30 degrees to level to get the image corner to corner. As you can see from the wide angle shot, it wasnt possible to get the whole rainbow in shot.

Acceptable at -33Ev but still needs work

It was then a matter of a little post processing in Photoscape 3.5 to help lift the color and overall tone of the images. Even doing this was somewhat problematic as there was very little contrast through the frame to work with, making it difficult to bring out color and highlights. I ended up with some images that were just okay and some that were (to me at least ) acceptable if not great.

Post Processing to bring out color and contrast.
Color is very accurate in this image.

Same post processing settings as above image,
straightened and cropped for visual balance.

Multiple rainbow refractions, unusual to see 5 refraction layers in rainbows.