Rainbow in a Sun Ray

Last night I caught a sun ray rainbow, just before sunset, at Topaz Lake on the Nevada/California border.  

You may have noticed that rainbows move as the sun moves.  White light contains all of the colors of the rainbow, and the rainbows we see are simply that light separated out into various wavelengths, which we perceive as colors.  This doesn't happen like it does with a prism, where the rainbow comes out the back side of the prism and that color-separated light is projected onto something.  Instead, raindrops do separate the colors of light through refraction, but instead of it escaping out the back, that light is reflected back out of the raindrop at a 42 to 43 degree angle.  So everywhere you see rainbow color is a raindrop, and if you draw lines back from that rain drop to yourself and to the light source, those lines meet in roughly a 43 degree angle.

Someone standing a mile north of you may see a rainbow, but their rainbow will be coming from a different set of rain drops making a 43 degree angle back to the sun, and their rain drops at that angle will also trace a "rainbow-shaped" arc in the sky.  This is why you can see rainbows while you drive, and they will appear to move and follow you (at that same angle to the sunlight) as you drive.

So as a photographer, if you don't like where the rainbow is, move!  As long as you don't move so much that "your" rainbow doesn't fall off the end of the column of water it's coming from and disappear into dry air, you should be able to place the rainbow where you want it.  Similarly, if you see the sun striking a column of water and the sun seems to be close to the right angle, simply move until you catch that 43 degree angle and can see and photograph the rainbow you anticipated that it was making.

— 
A while back I decided to auto-post my G+ posts to my blog (for reluctant people who just didn't want to come to G+ for whatever reason).  As G+ approaches 2 years old I decided to test my original Google +Blogger blog (www.MyPhotoGuides.com) to see if Google's integration had caught up with WordPress plug-ins yet.  I still don't see any capability to migrate post to the Blogger blog, and when I post a link to my Blogger post, even though I created it around a photo posted to G+ first, the photo shows up tiny on the G+ share of my Blogger post.  

Here's how I do it over on +WordPress: 
How to Set Up a Photography Web Site and WordPress Photo Blog
http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/2012/11/20/how-to-set-up-a-photography-web-site-and-wordpress-photo-blog/

You can see the G+ post mirrored to my WordPress blog here:
www.JeffSullivanPhotography.com/blog
There does seem to be a duplicate post at the moment, probably a short term bug.  In the past those sorts of things in the excellent WordPress plug-in by +Daniel Treadwell  have been cleared up quickly.

Rainbow in a Sun Ray

Google+: Reshared 33 times
Google+: View post on Google+