The title phrase is a curse, or I suppose an exclamation, that my dad used to say. Still does, perhaps – I haven’t heard it in a long time, but then I don’t get the chance to hang around him much.
Regardless of his language habits, these shots are actually from this morning, before the sun was visible over the horizon. I saw colors developing in the sky and trotted over to the pond, to be surprised with a sunrise rainbow. Because of the sun angle, I don’t think you can get a conventional rainbow any higher in the sky than this, though other atmospheric effects can occur.
This one is unaltered, and I thought I had the white balance set for sunlight – certainly looks that way from the red in the sky – but it seems I had auto white balance set instead. That’s what comes from shooting in a hurry before the rainbow faded, because I know that I should have been shooting in sunlight balance to keep the colors; doesn’t look like it had a bad effect anyway. I also did a few frames with the intention of joining them in a panoramic, producing a much wider angle of view than my lenses are capable of, but I still had the wide-angle lens mounted and the fisheye distortion is going to keep the frames from matching up without a lot of Photoshop work, so you’ll have to wait until later to see if I’m successful.
The secondary arc was only visible in places, and it was just for a brief period that the main arc was complete across the sky. By the time the sun was “up,” insofar as local sunrise is calculated, the bow had vanished – it was fading even as the first direct light touched the tops of the trees. I’d tried calling The Girlfriend to stop working on The Fabulous Christmas Quiche (yes that’s a proper noun) to come out and see it, but she never heard the phone ring – to the best of my knowledge, I’m the only one in the immediate area that actually saw the display. The early morning dog-walkers and joggers were all too late.
A quick attempt to be fartsy – it’s not exactly the time of year to have foreground elements to work with, you know. Though, granted, I was doing this in a T-shirt, shorts, and sandals – this is no surprise to anyone on the east coast presently, but it’s a reminder for anyone seeing this post at any later date – the weather has been ridiculously warm right now, courtesy of a warm front pushing lots of rain (as in, flood warnings) for the past few days.
Speaking of that, you might have thought that the rainbow indicated either a past or, more likely (it’s opposite the sun at sunrise, thus westerly) oncoming rain storm. However, nothing of the sort happened, nor did it look like it was about to; I think the rainbow was courtesy of nothing more than morning mist.
This one has gone through a slight color tweak to bring out more balanced colors, but the flare is from the original, an not an aspect of being too enthusiastic with the saturation settings – it shows up in some of the frames showing the other side, too, so I think it’s an artifact of the conditions.
With the fleeting phenomenon of the rainbow, I wasn’t paying any attention to the other colors in the sky, and by the time the bow was gone the clouds had largely become neutral as well. That’s okay – I think the rainbow was making for better photos anyway. Granted, I’ve seen better displays, but hey, it was a nice bonus for the morning.