Late this afternoon or early this evening – before sunset, anyway – we had some storms roll through, looking quite ominous for a bit, but what we ended up with were summer showers. The scattered nature of the thunderheads did let the sun poke through, and so we got a quite vivid rainbow for a decent amount of time, but granted, I boosted contrast on these for better display – in this case, as much to make the northern cardinals (Cardinalis cardinalis) stand out as to enhance the rainbow. The male didn’t want to pose out in the open like the female down there, but I snagged him as he crossed the bow, just not sharply.
The neighbor’s crepe myrtle tree (Lagerstroemia indica) was in the same direction as the bow, and so I didn’t even have to leave Walkabout Estates to frame a foreground element.
There were two items of note in the few minutes while the bow was visible, however.
The first was the second, meaning the secondary rainbow arc, seen here faintly above the first – this entered and left visibility in the space of two minutes or less. It was still raining lightly where I stood, and if you look at that higher arc, you can see a darker round shadow from a raindrop on the lens. This was better than the lens fogging up in the heat and humidity, which is what was happening when I first got out there since the camera had been sitting indoors in the air conditioning – it’s still hot as blazes around here, which the scattered showers have done little to alleviate.
I also suspected that I was seeing a hint of something else, and tweaking a few of the frames after I unloaded confirmed it.
Significant contrast enhancement was used here, but it shows the ‘echo’ of a supernumerary arc underneath the primary Roy G. Biv pattern of the main bow – I go into them in more detail (with better illustrations) here, but what you’re looking for are the faint violet and teal bands repeating underneath the rainbow, which happens in certain conditions.
So it gave me something to shoot for a few minutes, which was about as long as I wanted to be outside anyway. Balanced out nicely.
