rainbow

Photographer Aaron Watson, who goes by Skies Alive Photography, has seen many incredible things in the night sky. His latest sighting is a rare double "moonbow," a rainbow created by bright moonlight in precise conditions.

Christian Spencer became well-known for his stunning photos of hummingbirds that show rainbows in their wings, it's a specialized technique of shooting the amazing birds, one which Spencer pioneered.

A United Kingdom police helicopter spotted a full-circle rainbow during a recent flight, and it is a spectacular and rare view of a beloved natural phenomenon.

Photographer Akriti Sondhi’s images exhibit the artist’s affinity for expressing vibrant colors, as well as kindling the imaginations of onlookers. Mimicking a kind of psychedelic acrylic paint pour, Sondhi’s photo series Helix takes viewers on a journey of playful shapes, iridescent colors, and cosmic-like imagery.

When Stan Maupin retired and picked up his DSLR to shoot the hummingbirds in his backyard, he was "dared" to recreate Christian Spencer's gorgeous prism photos.

New Jersey photographer John Entwistle was shooting a sunset recently when an unusual rainbow appeared in the sky: it was what's known as a supernumerary rainbow, or a rainbow with one or more fainter rainbows stacked with it.

Here's a neat idea for light painting photos: if you build a custom light tube using a certain type of reflective metallic material, your photos will look like they're filled with rainbows.

There are instances when a photographer meticulously plans a wedding photo, and then there is serendipity. Such was the case for Portland wedding photographer Craig Mitchelldyer when he worked a wedding at Gorge Crest Vineyards near the Oregon/Washington border.

Just before sunset a few days ago, a gorgeous double rainbow appeared over the San Francisco Bay. I happened to have a fisheye lens attached to my camera, so I ran outside and snapped the shot above.

Tucson, Arizona-based photography enthusiast Greg McCown recently managed to capture a shot of a lifetime. While shooting landscapes near the small town of Marana, Arizona, McCown snapped this beautiful photo showing both a lightning bolt and a rainbow in the sky.

"After years of trying I finally got my lightning and rainbow picture," McCown writes.

The best portraits sometimes materialize before our eyes and fall right into our laps. That's what just happened to wedding photographer Wes Eisenhauer of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, who captured this gorgeous shot of his daughter under a rainbow.

Here's his explanation of what happened: "I ran outside to take a picture. My daughter chased after me. I told her to go back inside because she was in her pajamas and didn't have any shoes on. She didn't listen. I'm glad she didn't listen."

Want to snap a memorable bridal photo? Just have her pose on the side of a mountain, and then capture a double rainbow in the background. That's what Alaskan wedding photographer Josh Martinez did yesterday, resulting in the incredible image above.

Photographer Bertrand Kulik was standing at his window in Paris last week when he noticed something peculiar about the horizon. Although his view is ordinarily quite beautiful because of the Eiffel Tower dominating the cityscape, this time it had something he was treated with a bright and colorful horizon rainbow painted across the sky in the distance.

The colors you see in these photographs are real -- they're not simply landscapes modified using Photoshop. They're photographs of tulip fields captured by French photographer Normann Szkop from the air.

Programmer and photography enthusiast Roderick Lee Mann snagged quite the time-lapse video earlier this week. He had originally set up his camera to snap photos of a beautiful Hawaiian sunset, but afterward he discovered that he had captured something that you can't really plan for: the perfectly-framed formation of an end-to-end rainbow.

Looking for a photo project to play around with this weekend? Try exploring a technique known as the Harris Shutter. Invented in the days of film photography by Robert Harris of Kodak, it involves capturing three sequential exposures of a scene through red, green, and blue filters, and then stacking the images into a single frame. This causes all the static elements within the scene to appear as they ordinarily would in a color photo, while all the moving elements in the shot show up in one of the three RGB colors.

San Francisco residents were treated with a dazzling sight yesterday: a double rainbow all the way across the sky, visible from many parts of the city. The San Francisco Chronicle writes,

The mist mixed with golden light from the low-slung sun to cast a beautiful pink glaze across downtown skyscrapers. Thousands at the Giants baseball game took their eyes away from the game to gawk at a double rainbow that formed over center field, perfectly framed by the grandstands. "There was just some very light rain at the game, but it was amazing to see so many people bringing out their iPhones and taking a picture of it," said Mike Pechner, a forecaster with Golden West Meteorology who was at the game. Dozens of motorists pulled their cars to the side of the road to gawk and take pictures of the rare double-rainbow, created when the light refracted through the moisture in the air.

Want to add some custom tints to your photos without resorting to digital trickery? …

The Impossible Project has partnered up with Japanese music producer and designer Nigo …

"Global Rainbow" is an outdoor art installation by Yvette Mattern that consists of seven high powered lasers projecting a bright rainbow across the night sky. The rainbow was originally displayed in New York in 2009, but has since appeared in cities across the UK. If you're lucky enough to see the project in real life, be sure to take some photographs -- it's not every day you get to enjoy rainbows at night.

Photographer Grover Schrayer captured this amazing photograph of a rainbow in candle smoke.

Seeing a double rainbow is a relatively rare treat, but how about three or four rainbows? Scientists have only reported seeing triple rainbows five times over the past 250 years, but German photographer Michael Theusner was recently able to capture this first ever photograph of a fourth-order rainbow. Ordinary rainbows (first and second order) appear in the area of the sky opposite the sun (and aren't seen in his shot), but when higher order rainbows appear, they show up on the sunward side.