Obscured by Clouds, Catching a Rainbow

No, this isn’t one of my rants about cloud computing hype. I’m talking about real clouds here, not mythical ones. As I was leaving my house this morning a rainbow caught my eye. What was most striking about it at first was the fact that it was partially behind some clouds at first. In all my years on this earth I have yet to see a rainbow that is mostly obscured by clouds.

Thankfully I had my camera with me (as I’m stalking the 787 around my office window these days.) I stopped, and backed up a bit, and stepped out of the car to fire off the shot you see above. I continued on my way, and at the bottom of the hill, where I turn onto SR 530 there is an old-style blue barn, and the rainbow was now clearly visible above that picturesque barn. Unfortunately this dairy farmer has stacked up shipping containers around the base of the barn so a little telephoto in-lens cropping to eliminate the eyesores…

Further down the road where the two forks of the Stillaguamish River meet and the valley opens up I noted how the light was playing all sorts of tricks and had to again stop and shoot a few frames. The rainbow was now casting a strange “shadow” of light from the low-angle sun we see at this latitude (48°N) this time of year. Another phenomena I have rarely seen, and until now never captured.

Sitting aside the road, with my camera atop a small tripod on my car’s roof, it was a great start for the day. Sort of put me at peace to stop and catch a rainbow instead of just trudging to the office through traffic again.

3 thoughts on “Obscured by Clouds, Catching a Rainbow”

  1. By the way, a little note for the photo-nerds here: The Panasonic Lumix G1 I shoot with now makes rainbow-catching a breeze. I remember back in my Kodachrome days how hard it was to shoot rainbows. They leap out of the background to the human eye, but silver-based films for some reason have a hard time selecting rainbows. I do recall a trick from those days, which was to manually overide the ASA/ISO settings and shoot as if your film were “slower”… The G1 lets you do this on the fly and the unique “see what the CCD sees” viewfinder lets you observe and confirm the settings changes in real-time. You can literally see the rainbow become more visible as you change the ISO. Very cool.

  2. VERY COOL! I’ve seen both phenomena, only once each, and *never* had a camera with me! I was stunned when I saw the ‘rainbow-behind-a-cloud,’ this past summer…had to pull off the road and just watch!

    Maybe this is your good karma, coming back to you, after contributing to the Washington state parks and rec program…:)

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