Caught my first Yosemite waterfall rainbow today

Thwack

A buddy and I hiked out to Sentinel Dome Saturday morning. We spent a few hours shooting everything we could find then had a quick lunch before heading down the Dome for Taft Point. About halfway down the Dome, I happened to glance over at Yosemithttp://thwack.smugmug.com/photos/684148023_H3hPE-M.jpge Fall (across the valley) and caught the beginning of a rainbow in the waterfall's mist. Over the course of the next twenty minutes or so, we snapped scores of pictures while the rainbow worked its way down to the bottom of that waterfall.

I've seen pictures of the effect before but this was the first time I caught it live. I'm glad I had a big lens with me so I could zoom in to catch the show.

I've only quickly processed three of the pictures from the series. The first was fairly early in the show, the second one is towards the end of the effect, and the third one is the last shot I took before the effect vanished:

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That big storm earlier in the week brought Yosemite Fall back to life. It was bone dry a few weeks ago…

schmoo

Amazing! I couldn't imagine how impressive it must have been in real life, because your photos are impressive enough. The colors are so subtle and yet so bright at the same time.

How does the rainbow move? Is it the sun moving, or something about the way the water is falling?

Thwack

Thanks for the kind words. It's incredible to see one of these in person!

The effect started at the top of the waterfall but was pretty subtle since there's not much of a mist cloud up there.

As the sun moved through the sky, the rainbow moved lower in the water column. It moves slowly enough you don't really notice it unless you have a pile of pictures to look back at.

When the effect hit the bottom, where there was a good mist cloud, it really stands out. Definitely easier to see with polarized sunglasses (or a circular polarizing filter) to cut the glare.

The buddy I was shooting with showed me one of his shots…essentially the same camera setup but he used better software for processing and has even better colors.

I was in a hurry to share the shots so I just used iPhoto (quick and easy but slightly limited in what it can do vs. Capture NX, Adobe's Lightroom, etc).

I plan to go back to the raw shots and re-work them from scratch in a Capture NX or Photoshop in the near future. I'm hoping to get closer to what my buddy came up with since we were shooting the same scene.

I think we caught it at almost the very beginning. So, I should be able to pick three or four shots in sequence that do a better job of showing the effect's progression.

The first shots I took also had Lower Yosemite Fall in them so they weren't zoomed as tight as these. After a few minutes, it dawned on me that the lower fall wasn't adding anything so I zoomed in more.

I really like the colors in the ones I zoomed in tightest on, but those shots lose some of the context by clipping off the top of the waterfall.

I highly recommend Sentinel Dome on a sunny mid-October day shortly after a big rain storm. I was in Yosemite in early September and that waterfall was dead…not even the slightest trickle! The upper elevations of the park received nine inches of rain in the storm that moved through a few days before we hit the Park. That definitely had the water falls flowing for us.

Thwack

I'm still poking at processing these better. Since Adobe just released a free beta of Lightroom 3, I figured I'd try that...with a ton of help from a buddy that's already using the current Lightroom, here's one of the shots from near the end of the rainbow's effect:

thapamd

Great colors you capture!

aj986s

Those captures are wonderful! Congrats of taking good advantage of the right place at the right time!

wendell

Great capture, it looks like the water is on fire! Great job.
wl

Thwack

Thanks for the kind words. I'd love to be there to catch one of these again (and again and…). They're spectacular to watch!