Chasing a rainbow all the way home

On Thursday, I was driving back home after taking portraits of a client. While taking the portraits, we had a variety of sunshine, clouds and a pretty good amount of rain. We managed to get some nice photos and I was back in the car heading south. For almost the entire drive, I had an amazing rainbow in front of me.

As I always teach that for a really good photo, you need a good foreground and background. In other words, I prefer not to take just a photo of a rainbow. I prefer to have more in the shot.

I was driving down Highway 280 and was hoping for a shot of the rainbow with the old Stanford Dish. I saw this and pulled over to the side of the road, put the Canon 1D X Mark II and Canon 70-200mm lens out the window, and got this photo.

I drove up a little farther on the highway until I saw this shot with the trees and cows as my supporting subjects.



Ultimately, this was the photo I wanted most. You may recognize this tree from a photo I took many years ago. It is the lone tree on a hillside, and a site that I see quite often. But not like this! I really like this photo but wanted to see what it looked like with a closer crop.

I really love this photo and it is my favorite from the evening.

This composition was interesting to me as well, but once again I had the fence in the shot.

Using the adaptive healing brush and clone tools in Adobe Photoshop CC, I went in and removed the fence and other distractions from the photo.

Thirty minutes later I arrived at my house and still had the rainbow in sight. I walked down my street to one of the blossoming cherry trees and framed this shot with the rainbow behind the blossoms.

I tried a variety of different compositions...

I went inside my house to tell my wife about this beautiful rainbow, and when we got back outside, it had turned into a double rainbow. Just for fun (and since I had the 70-200mm zoom lens on my camera), I decided to put the DSLR down and take a wide panorama shot with my iPhone. I did a little bit of retouching in Photoshop and ended up with this photo. Not too shabby for a cameraphone picture.

This beauty of nature not only let me capture some pretty photos, but also made a commute in traffic way more interesting!

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