Weather - Lightning, Storms, Clouds etc

Not just a Rainbow

I've been watching the revised Alex Filippenko series of lectures for TTC on Understanding the Universe and he explains the creation of rainbows very well, he also went into supernumerary bows which I hadn't heard of before. Just the next day a passing shower allowed me to hastily photograph the phenomena!

The basic idea is that light passing through a rain drop will bounce off the inside walls of the drop and exit at specific angles; the light bends differently along its wavelength so splitting the white light into its colour's like a prism does. The supernumerary bows are the blue/green stripes at the bottom of the rainbow that don't fit into the expected pattern of the spectrum. These are patterns of interference attributed to the wave nature of light, in-phase and out-phase creating amplification and cancellation, but this is not fully explained in science at all. I think it fits into the quantum wave-particle duality business somewhere?! More info on this optical mystery can be found here.

This image was taken in March 2008, I saw the rain followed by the sunshine and predicted there may be a rainbow and sure enough there was possibly the brightest rainbow I've ever seen. This picture has been over saturated with Photoshop to really show how complex the colouring is and clearly show the four cyan coloured bands; or four supernumerary bows.

Lightning

One of the most exciting, rewarding and also dangerous areas of photography! I guess you just have to take risks and get out there, the chances of actually getting struck are probably about as high as tripping over a rock and cracking your head open! There are however other risk associated with taking pics of lightning as often the best storms happen while its tipping it down with rain and its not easy to get the shots without getting the camera wet.

The area I live in is not good storm chasing terrain, I'd guess we probably get about 3 or 4 storms a year here on average and most of those are of lower intensity than you would want for photography, this means early warning is an advantage and you have to drop anything you were doing (including sleeping) and grab your camera! Generally night-time is the only way to get good shots as you need to hold the shutter open without over-exposing while waiting for lighting to strike.

In the time that I have owned my Nikon there has only been one proper storm and it occurred at about 5am one morning; woken to the sound of thunder in the distance. It was hammering it down with rain but pretty active so I jumped out of bed and headed into the garden with the camera and tripod to try and find a sheltered spot. After realising I wasn't going to get much from there I came back in looking for a better vantage point from within the house but by that time the camera and lens was soaked. I didn't realise the the lens had taken so much water and in the darkness I didn't notice that it was playing havoc with focusing, in hindsight i should have had the focus set to infinity anyway but in the rush of the moment I was making mistakes.

Anyway, enough excuses, all the lightning shots you see on this page are the best of what I got that night.

Interesting Clouds

Left: I just happened to look up from my back garden one day and there it was; no storm as such and certainly no super-cells! Just a well defined shape under the leading edge of a cloud, I have done a fair bit of photoshop tweaking to make it stand out more. I don't have an explanation for a cloud like this but English weather does seam to be getting more extreme; I've seen several pictures of small tornado's and water spouts here in the last few years.

 

Right: Another flooky moment, this cloud had the appearance of a skull with the eye but Photoshop really brings out the likeness. I doubt its an omen of any kind so I wouldn't go preparing for the end of the world or anything!