Friday evening, the rain decided to throw down (it was certainly much harder than falling,) and typically for the weather we’re having this year, it passed quickly. As the sun returned, I checked to see if we were having a rainbow, but saw nothing. Turns out it was only being fashionably late, and wasn’t terribly bright when it arrived, but as The Girlfriend and I looked towards the top of the arc, we could distinctly see something that I first witnessed almost exactly a year ago. I ran in to get the camera, and it had faded to a degree in that short time, but I still managed to capture enough to illustrate this again. This image has slightly enhanced contrast to make it more evident.
Supernumerary rainbows are a partial repetition of the prism pattern on the underside of the main bow (there are often two, with the primary one being brighter and lower,) an optical ‘echo’ of sorts. Last year, my sources had indicated that we didn’t actually know how they occurred, which it turns out is partially true. Looking it up again this year, I found a better source which not only explains that the size of the rain droplets has a lot to do with it, you can even see the difference in effect with raindrop size by playing with their little doodad on the site. According to them there editors at Atmospheric Optics, the smaller the raindrop, the more distinct the inner bows tend to be – which is exactly the opposite of what I would have expected, given the conditions in which I’ve seen them both times. However, I was not out witnessing the rain at the tail end of the summer squall, so maybe the raindrops got smaller as it passed, shoved out of their place in the lunch line by the bigger bully drops.
Photographing rainbows is a bit like sunsets (mentioned in the previous post,) but probably takes even more effort. Bracketing heavily in both exposure and contrast settings is recommended, since the camera is less capable of discerning the subtle contrast differences that our eyes can see, and the exposure meter will be affected by pointing up into the sky. Achieving ideal brightness and saturation is therefore tricky, and it’s very easy to get nothing at all like what you were seeing unless you really work at it.
This is the same image, but with saturation thrown way the hell up – there will be another version at the bottom of this post. Now the additional bands below the main bow are plainly visible, reducing in width and starting to give a three-dimensional effect, as if numerous bows were stacked alongside one another into the distance, and we’re seeing their undersides. This is not the case, since rainbows are an optical phenomenon of light diffraction refraction and thus don’t really have a ‘distance’ – you can’t get closer to them, thus all the folklore about “over” and “beyond” and “at the end of” rainbows, which like the horizon are always distant and unattainable. In other words, it’s all cruel mocking.
As another small aside, shooting photos of this nature is a very good way to find out just how much dust and schmutz is on your digital sensor, more than a little annoying to me because it’s very tricky to remove it in the image, especially around the color bands themselves, and because I just cleaned the damn thing before I went to the beach. It must be pleasant to be a studio photographer who changes lenses in a nice clean environment all the time…
Soon afterward, the sun rose into that line that can be seen over it, in the photo above, which was another solid wall of clouds – at that point the conditions sank back into hazy twilight. I waited around a bit, and was rewarded by the occasional appearance that let me do some more moody breaker photos. For unknown reasons, the birds were particularly sparse on this trip – I did not see one pelican at all – and so the ‘typical’ beach wildlife shots weren’t part of the gallery this time around. Even the occasional seagull or tern was framed against darker clouds and lower light conditions, making it hard to freeze them in midair since the shutter speeds went a little too long to allow this – you’ve seen perhaps the best example in the previous post.
As they get larger, the camo pattern fades, perhaps because they’re faster and more adept at escaping, and also maybe because they’re no longer good targets, in size and defensiveness, for predators. I spotted one ducking into a larger burrow as I approached, and sat down to wait it out, which doesn’t take too long.
This one was about 4cm across the carapace, so not quite a hand-span in overall width, and I wasn’t shooting with a long focal length for this at all; just a little out of the frame at bottom were my crossed legs. The crab dragged up a load of sand tucked into its legs and pincers, moving cautiously but not particularly slowly, and since I’d been sitting with the camera already raised to my eye it was easy enough to get a sequence of frames. Now, the camera isn’t particularly heavy (though I think I still had the flash attached,) but when you have to sit perfectly still in ready position and wait for something to happen, you quickly realize how fatiguing this can be. I could have spent some time building myself a nice comfortable lounge chair out of sand, but by then the sun would have been too high and the crabs would have called it a day. Maybe next trip.
My timing was right on this one: if you look closely at upper right, you can actually see sand in midair that the crab was flinging away. As soon as this action takes place the crab typically shoots back into the burrow, instinctively aware that the motion attracts attention. This makes me wonder what purpose is served by hurling the sand away rather than simply depositing it subtly, which would be a lot harder to see, but I’ve watched this behavior from numerous specimens so it seems to be typical.
This was sunset – what there was of it – at a little harbor in Avon. About all I could do was position myself to place that strange bump in the clouds over the tree to make it look like it belonged there. If you look close, you can see the faint shadow cast by that slightly taller cloud onto the humidity layer above, the kind of thing that makes sun rays (or crepuscular rays, if you want the technical term) in better conditions than this.
While waiting to see if the sunset might improve a bit, I was looking carefully at this anvil cloud well north of where I was, with a couple of rising cumulonimbus clouds in front of it. This kind of cloud formation will often result in thunderstorms, and the heat and humidity conditions of the day supported this possibility; it’s the same kind of thing that causes the frequent summer afternoon thunderstorms (I call them monsoons) in Florida. The sun hadn’t quite set at this time so the sky was still pretty bright, and I could see no actual lightning activity in the clouds, but wondered nonetheless. Traveling north was easy – there are really only two choices from Avon, north and south, unless you happen to have an amphibious vehicle, or wings of some sort. A hovercraft would do it too. But okay, most of us would have just two choices, and hitting NC 12 north would be taking me almost directly towards this distant cloud formation. I decided to chance it, since I had only one other thing planned for the evening, and I could do that just about anywhere.
I cannot, to no one’s surprise, neglect my normal subject matter even when I’m on a trip specifically to produce more scenic and landscape photos than I can achieve in my normal haunts. When stopping to put air in a leaky tire, this very small green treefrog (Hyla cinerea) was startled from its perch near the air hose, so I grabbed the camera and got just a couple of frames. It was getting much darker by this time and I was on the shady side of the building, so I had to focus by the light of a penlight held in one hand, which is a trick all in itself, one that I’ve had to do far too often – one hand holds the camera, while the other supports and focuses the lens, so a couple of spare fingers in there must not only hold the light, they have to aim it where the lens is pointing at the same time. If you haven’t tried this yet, you simply must.
All of this is fascinating, at least to me, but it’s also not really germane to this immediate situation, for one simple reason: this specimen was a juvenile, so no mating behavior was about to take place. What I consider most likely is that it encountered another mantis, quite possibly one of the Chinese mantids (Tenodera sinensis,) but something happened to interrupt the meal, and so it was only partially consumed. I searched the plants for any evidence of another, still wondering how either of them might have crossed the significant moat that is our backyard pond, before realizing that the victim here might have fallen from the overhanging branches. And there’s one other thing that could support this idea.
One last frame, to demonstrate scale – now you understand why my handling of it wasn’t that secure. Yeah, I know, I should be an expert in handling tiny fragile insects by now, able to snag a fly in midair without harming it, restringing damaged spider webs and all that. But I’m still a guy, and there’s only so delicate that we’re supposed to be, you know?
Both of these views, despite their glaring dissimilarity, are from Creef’s Cut, in the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge just off of NC 64, a little inland from the Outer Banks – see the 
Being there at a busy time for tourists, I didn’t attempt any full-length or establishing shots of the Bodie Island lighthouse, even though the area makes it fairly easy to do this – just didn’t want all those people in my images. Instead, I chose a few different angles that hid unwanted elements (like the full parking lot, easily visible from this shooting angle) and still tried to be fartsy – I’ll let you decide if I succeeded or not. I’ve done a lot of shooting around Bodie Island light, including 
Above is the view from the platform seen in a previous image, looking out over the marsh area that borders the sound side of the barrier island – a great egret (Ardea alba) made an appearance but wasn’t inclined to venture closer for a better portrait.
This is just a hint, because there are several posts getting lined up right now but it’ll take me a little bit to get to them. Feel free to guess how I spent the past couple of days.
The webbernets is great, I have to admit. Yes, someone did make one at one time, and it turns out to be the same manufacturer as my previous flat-panel flash: Sunpak. The Sunpak Auto 322, while long discontinued, is a flexible little unit with a bundle of aiming options, a built-in PC sync cord, and manual output ranging from full to 1/32nd power, as well as thyristor-controlled automatic exposure. It can flop 180° atop the shoe mount, sitting to the left, right, or vertically, and the smaller flash head can pivot 180° on its own, as can be seen in my image. It is a little bigger than palm size but about half of the weight of the Metz and much better balanced. It runs off four AA batteries and has a Guide Number of 24m/80′ – not the strongest flash you’ll find, but more than adequate for macro work.
