This was taken from Hurricane Hill, a short hike from the end of the Hurricane Ridge / Hurricane Hill road in the Olympic National Park. There is a rainbow reflection in the middle of the rain shower over the Strait of Juan de Fuca. I haven’t looked down on a rainbow like this before … not sure exactly what to call it, since it isn’t really a “bow”. I wish it was more clear, but it is what it is … I played with it in Lightroom, but this was the best I could do.
I took this image before stitching together images to create panoramas was ‘click a button’ easy. In those days getting a full rainbow in a single image required wide angle lenses. A 21mm lens (on a 35mm film camera or equivalent digital camera) would capture the whole of a single rainbow. This was taken with a 14mm lens to try and get as much of the double as possible (there has been some cropping of the image on the edges). A wider lens tends to have a strong fisheye effect or at least significant distortion along the edges. In this case, the left end of the double is hidden by trees and the right end is barely visible due to brightness of the sky.
I took this image from the parking lot of an apartment building in Olympia, Washington, across a vacant lot that was going to be part of the complex (or at least, that was the plan).
I expect that partial rainbows are much more common than full rainbows. We get both kinds pretty often here in Port Townsend … one of the advantages of our frequently rainy weather (and there aren’t many). But I saw several in a couple of days the last week or so. The rain plus broken clouds did the trick.
This is the lighthouse at Point Wilson in For Worden State Park in Port Townsend, WA. I had to walk around a bit to get the ‘bow coming down close to the lighthouse, and didn’t notice the flock of birds (too far away for me to identify) until I was reviewing the image at home. The sunlight brightening up the lighthouse was particularly nice.
I thought this was a little unusual for a rainbow … lots of the reds and not so much (if any) blues and greens. This is looking directly east with the sun low in the western sky. There was a VERY faint double showing in the left of the sky, but it didn’t show up much in the image. This was taken with my iPhone with it set on wide angle … which created some distortion. I corrected some of that in Lightroom, but it stretched out the tree on the right margin some.