A world within a rainbow

©2008 Alexander Nail. Do not use this image in any fashion without my prior permission

One of the most miserable days on Skye ended with patches of sunlight and the obvious hope of rainbows. Guy and I went in search of the perfect shot in the car. You might want to call it "rainbow chasing", which I guess is the slightly hippie version of storm chasing.

Well done to Guy for driving fast enough to get us to a hopeful location. When we were arrived we were ahead of the clouds but only a very faint rainbow was visable. Without wellies it would have been hard to get this one. I had to run about 100 meters through bog to get to a veiw of this small collection of trees which I had seen from the road.

My only slight reservation with this image is that the trees on the right touch the rainbow. I made that decision in order to avoid inclusion of a rather large conifer which threw the shot completely. I only just had time to recompose without it before the moment had gone. It would have been nice to include the entire double rainbow, but that would have meant firstly including the conifer and secondly shooting a vertical pano of 4 or 5 shots which, as it turned out, I didnt have time to do after this shot.

The rainbow lasted only 3 or 4 minutes but it was the second most spectacular I can remember. This shot illustrates Alexander's Dark Band quite well and you can just make out supernumeraries at the top, which appeared much clearer at the time.