Rainbow Over Lake Tahoe - How I Shot It

Yesterday I posted a video where I tried to photograph a rainbow but my efforts failed and I saw no rainbows. In the video, I talked about the importance of accepting failure when shooting landscape photography. My efforts put me in a rainbow kind of mood, so today I am posting a Lake Tahoe rainbow shot that I captured in August of 2017. This is an entry for @juliank's @photocontests #colourfulphotography and #landscapephotography.

This image was photographed on a Canon 5Dsr with a 16-35mm lens set at 16mm. The ISO was 50 so I could get the best quality resolution from the camera and so I can print this one huge with no digital noise showing up in the print. The aperture was f11, with a wide-angle lens that aperture has a great depth of field and everything in the foreground and background is sharp in focus. The shutter speed was 25 seconds long. This long exposure is what allowed the water surface to look smooth even though there was plenty of movement to the water's surface.

A tripod was used but no shutter release cable was used because it was lightly raining and I did not want to have the electronic ports open to the elements. Instead, I used the 2-second timer on the camera. I also used a graduated neutral density filter in front of the lens in order to darken the sky a bit and balance out the sky exposure with the foreground exposure. A polarizer was also used. As I said in yesterday's video, I like to use a polarizing filter when shooting rainbows, you can bring out a little more color to the rainbow and have it look better when you use that filter. The polarizing filter also cut through the glare on the surface of Lake Tahoe and showed the boulders below.

This is a case where I was happy I did not focus on my original subject matter too much. I had actually set up the camera looking in the opposite direction, looking west, the direction the sun would be setting. I happened to look over my shoulder and saw this beautiful rainbow appear, so I quickly changed my set up and focused on the rainbow instead. Glad I did! One downfall to shooting rainbows is the rain... I tried to protect the lens from the rain with my hand during the shot but I still had to wipe the raindrops off the polarizing filter between each shot.

Thank you for looking and reading!

Scott Thompson
Scott Shots Photography