2008.05.31
Chasing Rainbows
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Yesterday several very brief thunderstorms rolled through the city. The storms were all very small and localized. One passed over my office around 12:00pm, and only lasted about 25 minutes. It looked small, and apparently it was much smaller than the city – it only hit part of the south half of the city, moving West to East.
Another very small storm hit downtown (where I live) shortly after I got home, and a second storm followed about an hour later (while I was out for a walk, conveniently). Afterwards, though, I happened to glance to the east and see a very bright rainbow. I was in the middle of supper, but this was one of those “drop everything and grab the camera” moments. I haven’t had much luck with rainbows in the past, but I seldom get an opportunity as good as this, so I snapped close to 40 pictures in about ten minutes. I tried a wide range of shots using a wide range of focal lengths to see what I liked.
In the end, I only wound up keeping a handful of the photos I shot (partly due to some nasty crud on the camera sensor that I discovered afterwards, which needless to say got cleaned today). I learned the following:
- I prefer a wide-angle shot with rainbows, since it gives you a bigger swath of sky to play with.
- Shots that are zoomed past 50mm need to have significant interest other than the rainbow itself, and are really only interesting to me if the rainbow is interacting with another feature. The juxtaposition of the rainbow with the landscape can also be interesting if you can line things up right.
- Shoot now, or forever hold your piece. Composition is important, of course, but rainbows don’t last long, and since I’m shooting with a digital camera, “shoot first and delete later” is a viable approach.
Now that I’ve experimented a bit, I will probably shoot fewer bad rainbow photos in the future. One of the big benefits of digital photography to an amateur like me is the ability to try a lot of different shots and see what works out. Next time I have the opportunity, I’m sure I’ll get better photos because I won’t bother with things that didn’t work this time around.
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