An attempt at a rainbow

greenpea

So I'm out on the Washington coast this weekend near the tiny town of Pacific Beach (the town in the picture). Its a bit risky to be on the coast in Washington in October because the weather can be quite bad (but rental prices are a lot cheaper). So the weather has been rain switching to sun and back to rain all day. What this does for photo ops is plenty of great rainbows. So my question to all of you out there, what is the trick for getting a picture of a rainbow? Polarizer? Overexpose or Underexpose? Graduated ND filter? Any advice would be appreciated.

So here is what I've pulled off so far (using a polarizer)...

cmason

try pumping up the saturation maybe the hue... its worth a shot

greenpea

cmason wrote:

try pumping up the saturation maybe the hue... its worth a shot

I pushed it just a touch and that helped a bit. But I'm wondering if there are any in camera tricks.

Grizzle6

I've found in the past that a polarizer, depending on how you dial it in, can kill the rainbow. Next time either try it without, or mess around with different levels of polarization.

greenpea

Grizzle6 wrote:

I've found in the past that a polarizer, depending on how you dial it in, can kill the rainbow. Next time either try it without, or mess around with different levels of polarization.

The rainbow was changing fast, at first I tried w/o a polarizer, and as best as I could tell on a 2.5" LCD in full daylight was that I got nothing. Then I put the polarizer on and found that as I dialed it would change the colors of the rainbow (or at least which colors were most prominent). If I dialed all the way, the rainbow would disapear.