Photographer’s Beautiful Pictures of Rainbows That Appear in Bird Wings
A photographer had a happy accident while capturing birds in his garden when rainbows began appearing in their wings.
Andrew Fusek Peters was experimenting with underexposures around dawn on a cold December morning when he was “gobsmacked” by what he saw on the back of his camera while shooting into the breaking sunlight.
“One of the birds came out, it was a blue tit, and the wings had turned into rainbows and I thought what the f*** is going on?” He tells PetaPixel.
Fusek Peters began researching and discovered Christian Spencer’s stunning hummingbird photos and quickly realized that very few photographers have ever captured the prism phenomenon.
“I got rather excited and I started trying to replicate it and then I got blue tits, long-tail tits, robins, a robin fighting a greenfinch and I just thought, ‘This is extraordinary’.”
The British photographer has captured dozens of rainbow photos with different garden birds all while shooting in his kitchen. However, as Earth’s orbit continues the position of the Sun changes and Fusek Peters hasn’t managed any good shots since the end of January.
He thinks that he could recreate the shots in a different environment but for a short window during the winter, his kitchen provided the perfect vantage spot.
“I noticed Christian Spencer looks like he’s just shooting into the light, he’s not doing it at dawn or dusk. So, I have a feeling there are different ways to achieve this,” he says.
“But I would think that if you are shooting directly into the light you’re going to have to ISO 80, 1/3200 of a second — You’re going to have to really work hard to counteract the power of that light and not blow out these highlights and all those incredible layers of color.”
Fusek Peters used an OM-1 Mark II shooting at around 1/5000 of a second to freeze the birds’ wings. He hails the camera being able to focus in “very, very low light”. Adding that, “I was shooting minus three to minus four exposure compensation in virtual darkness.”
Last year, a physics paper explained the science behind the rainbows stating that it is a type of diffraction causes by tiny hairs on the bird wings.
PetaPixel readers may remember Fusek Peters after he lost part of his finger when a heavy-duty trip closed on it. He is now recovered but the freak accident has left a mark on him.
More of Fusek Peters’ work can be found on his website, Instagram, and Facebook.
Image credits: All photos by Andrew Fusek Peters.
