So what do you call a rainbow at night? Is there such a thing? You bet there is! But you have to plan for it - way ahead of time. We spent a couple of days at Yosemite in April. The falls are fed from snow runoff which is HUGE right now. We made sure there was going to be a full moon and made our reservations months ago.
And wouldn't you know it - the weather turned bad. But we did have one good, clear, sunny, warm day (and night) before the clouds, cold, rain, snow, moved in - which meant we got to see pretty much the entire gamut of weather patterns.
To catch the moon bow, we made sure to ge there early enough to do some testing as the moon was setting. I wound up prefocusing the camera at the falls, then doing 2 or 3 minute exposures at 24mm f/6.3. And while pointing the camera straight at a 30mph (or so) wind full of spray. The camera (a Nikon D700) performed very nicely. I did put a clear filter on the front of the lens to protect it, and bought a poncho and taped the opening for the face around the front of the lens. It was a challenge not to have the whole thing just fly away. (Next time, I get a real camera raincoat.)
A lot of the images of a lunar rainbow is bright, but i think they're too bright. It is hard to tell the difference between these shots and night shots, other than just someone claiming it. So I did brighten the images, but not a lot so that it does look like it's at night.
Pictures I caught during the raining day were somewhat muted in colors, so I just went with the flow and applied different B/W techniques. Also, the images I caught when it was sunny was really the wrong time of day to take excellent pictures, but I really didn't have a choice. I knew weather was coming in so I went where I could and shot away - all the time during mid-day. Why is it not a good time? The bright sun and subsequent shadows extend the dynamic range of light way beyond a camera's capability. It also causes some nasty coloration due to the humidityand bright sky. But if it comes to catching a shot no matter the problems or not catching the shot, I shoot. I can always delete afterwards, huh?
The long set of pictures (with images of Kathy and I), head over here:
http://www.thecalderwoods.org/tom/Yosemite/
The best-of gallery is here:
http://tccphotography.zenfolio.com/p604281810
I'm still struggling with some weird colorization on the shots, and I'm finding my screen won't calibrate quite right, and trying to do it on my laptop gives me crappy results. We'll see.
