Double Rainbow

I took this photo back in may after a rainstorm, but wasn't quite happy with it at first. After revisiting it to prepare it for a family member to use, I decided to re-edit the photo and clean it up a bit. This is one of my all time favorite images from the lake, with the sun beginning to set directly behind me when it was taken, allowing for the rainbow to be perfectly centered on the dock. There is even a hint of a double bow visible in the clouds as well, and you can see the bright area inside the rainbow as well as the bow itself reflected in the water, although broken up by the ripples.

I'm always fascinated by how refracted light passing through trillions of tiny water droplets comes together to make the same pattern every time, all due to the way each ray slows down and changes direction when passing from air into the water, then bounces around inside the droplets, until a portion of it exits out in roughly the direction it entered the droplet, but shifted by precisely the same amount based on the frequency of each wavelength of light.

Did you know that infrared and ultraviolet light rays are also part of the rainbow, and we would be able to see a much larger rainbow if our eyes were sensitive to more frequencies? What we see is just the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, but other colors are there in the sunlight as well, and they too get passed through the droplet prisms.

Earthshine

Since I was a kid, I've always been fascinated by astronomy. When I was 9, I got my first telescope at a yard sale for $10, missing an eyepiece. I took apart the sighting scope and re-assembled the lenses in it to create a new eyepiece, and subsequently spent every night I could stargazing. I projected the image of the sun onto paper to see sunspots, and watched the moons of Jupiter change positions each night. But I've always been most fascinated by the beautiful details on our nearest neighbor, the moon. My favorite time to moongaze is between crescent moon and first half, when the earth illuminates the portion of the disk of the moon not in direct sunlight.

Fast forward to when I got my first DSLR with a telephoto lens, I tried to capture this image, but was never able to get both the sunlit and earthlit parts of the moon to balance, due to the extreme difference in brightness. Now that I've learned a bit about exposure blending, and composite imaging, I've always wanted to produce one of these images.

The other night, I captured several crescent moon images, at various exposures, and was able to blend 2 of them to create this image. A small amount of haze in the sky added a nice glow to the moon, creating a dreamy environment, and I couldn't be happier with how this turned out.

The Campfire

I remember growing up some of my favorite moments are when we were camping, or had a bonfire. I love watching fire, the smell of smoke, the sounds of the embers crackling, and the feeling of warmth coming from the glowing flames.

Plus, nothing can beat a perfectly done freshly toasted marshmallow! (They go pretty good with chocolate and graham crackers too.)