The first challenge in finding a rainbow is finding one to photograph in the first place. Any rainbow requires two elements, light and water droplets. The light needs to be from small source and very bright, so it’ll usually need to be direct sunlight (although it is possible to find and photograph “moonbows”) they’re very hard to see and even harder to capture well. The need for both sunlight and rain or mist means you’ll usually need to look for rainbows in mixed weather (rainy conditions without complete overcast) or in other places where mists form in broad sunlight (waterfalls, such as my Iceland image above, geysers, and the like.)

The physics of rainbows shows that when they appear, primary rainbows will always appear at angles about 140 degrees from the sun, in other words, you’ll want to look for rainbows not so much toward the sun as away from it. This figure has one important implication for nature photographers, unless you can see down for a long way (into a deep canyon, or down from a mountaintop or airplane) you won’t be able to see a rainbow in the sky when the sun is high. At moderate latitudes, your chances for rainbows will be limited to the beginning and end of the day. As you move closer to the poles, the sun stays low longer (if there’s sun at all!), and opportunities increase.

Because rainbows aren’t physical objects but reflections from water droplets, it is possible at times to “move the rainbow”, as you move your point of view, the rainbow appears to move relative to the objects in front of and behind it, so long as there is in fact a rainbow visible from the new location. In some situations this will allow you to move the rainbow within the composition, perhaps for the better.

Bringing out the subjective intensity of rainbows seems to require care, all too often snapshots of rainbows lack the punch they seem to have in person. Polarizers (turned correctly) will help here, almost doubling the intensity of the rainbow relative to the scene around it, and are a great place to start. Proper exposure is also critical, as the most saturated rainbow colors will occur if the rainbow is exposed for the midtones, too light or too dark and the colors will muddy up or fade.

One final bit of advice, it is all too easy when one sees a great-looking rainbow to try and photograph it alone, for it’s own sake. While you’ll be able to get some pretty snapshots that way, in general those images rarely seem “great” when you’re done with them. Instead, look to combine rainbows with other elements of the scene, whether as a wide landscape, or as a more abstracted detail shot such as the one at the top of this article, you’ll find those images have a greater potential to really sing.

Clothing is simple, you already know you’ll want to take a hat and coat when you go out in the rainn, and you probably know to “dress in layers” so that you can add or remove layers as conditions change when shooting outdoors. That’s easy.

What’s tougher is keeping your hands warm while shooting. With today’s digital SLRs festooned with dozens of tiny buttons, working the camera while wearing gloves can be a real challenge. My solution to this is wearing convertible glove/mittens, sometimes called “glomitts.” Glomitts combine a fingerless glove with a mitten-like flap that can be folded back and velcro’d out of the way when it’s not covering the tips of your fingers. They’re fantastic.

Chemical hand warmers are another great addition to your cold weather gear. These inexpensive disposable cloth-covered packets, are small (about three by five inches, maybe a half-inch thick) and generate a modest amount of heat, one in each jacket pocket will do the trick.

Most modern DSLR gear performs pretty well at temperatures down to 0 °F (-20 °C) or so, but there are a few things to watch out for when shooting in the cold.

The first is battery life. DSLR battery life has improved markedly over the last few years, but pretty much all camera batteries just can’t provide as much power in the cold. Second, you’ll want to keep extra batteries (perhaps in a pants pocket, near your skin). You’ll also want to watch out for fogging or frost caused by your breath, it’s very easy in cold weather for the water in your breath to condense and even freeze on the back surface of the camera, making it harder to see the back LCD or see through the optical viewfinder.

Mist and rain present more significant challenges, digital cameras can be damaged by getting too wet. Most cameras take some steps to try and protect their inner workings from damaging moisture, but enough water will destroy nearly any digital camera (save for specialty underwater cameras), and so you do need to work to keep your equipment from getting too wet.

Hiking, you can start with just keeping your equipment in a good camera pack. While there are a few waterproof packs (e.g., the Lowepro DryZone line), their stiff waterproof zippers can be a pain in the cold, so I’d recommend skipping them unless there’s a risk of dropping your pack into the ocean. Instead, get a good pack, apply a good water-repellent spray to it, and then use a rain cover (a few models of pack feature built-in rain covers) or a plastic garbage bag in heavier rain.

When it’s time to shoot, plastic garbage bags can also provide a large cover over your camera and tripod, but shower caps or dedicated rain covers (e.g., the Kata Elements E-702) can provide easier rain protection for your camera in heavy rain.

A final challenge with rain is getting drops of water on the front lens element or filter; these can ruin a photograph. Sometimes a lens hood will do the trick, but when the wind is blowing mist toward the camera sometimes there’s just little that can be done except to wipe the front element with a lens cloth, shoot immediately, and repeat until you get a clean shot.

With just these few tips, you’ll find “bad weather shooting” easier and more fun. Enjoy!

I recently gave a photographic workshop along the San Mateo county coast (about 45 minutes south of San Francisco), and there were a few last minute cancellations. I suspect they’d checked the weather report, temperatures were expected to be in the high 40s with clouds and drizzle. It’s a pity these folks didn’t talk to me before cancelling, they missed out on some phenomenal photographic conditions. I knew better. Many of my favorite photographic images were taken under or at the edges of clouds, mists, fog or rain. While blue skies sell postcards, interesting photographs often require interesting light, and it’s emphasizing that lesson that’s the topic of this post.

Let’s look at how that workshop worked out. Heading first into nearby Butano State Park, we worked along a small stream running through a grove of coast redwoods. In full sunlight, the contrast between the things illuminated by full sunlight and those i shade would have been far too large to capture. Any single exposure would have suffered from with blown highlights, large areas of flat black shadows, or most likely, both. Close in on a patch of soil and you’d see a pale, dusty brown, dusty green ferns, dull tree bark and dry stream beds. Our rain and clouds lit the forest like a giant softbox, reducing the contrast range of the scene to something that can be easily captured in a single exposure. Moreover, the rain left the dirt a rich brown, the ferns shiny and emerald, and the streams flowing.

After working the redwood forest, we returned to the beach. The sky was overcast, but a little less thickly clouded over the local lighthouse, leaving that lighthouse brighter against the dark clouds behind it. Often variations in clouds work to dodge and burn the landscape in ways that create depth, this is even more true of scenes in scenes where the sun can sneak through an otherwise cloudy sky and spotlight elements of the landscape.

While the mist and clouds had left me optimistic about most of the day’s shoot, I did expect sunset to fizzle. For most of the afternoon the sky was completely overcast. Still, I knew better than to leave, and much to my surprise, a half hour before sunset a thin band opened up at the western horizon, glowing yellow, then orange, and eventually letting the sun’s disks show for twenty seconds or so, and eventually leaving us with pink crepsucular rays. Even with a small section of real “interest” in the sky we were able to explore a number of options for compositions combining the surf, sea stacks, and the band of sunset color.

There are challenges to working in adverse weather, protecting both you and your camera from the elements. (I’ll be posting more about some of the tricks and tools I use to protect my own gear soon.) But you’ll find those small efforts more than repaid in photographic opportunities if you try, bad weather really does make for great photographs.