Photographing rainbows

Double rainbow, Sony A7 III, Tamron 17-28mm f/2.8, 3 shot panorama.

Photographing rainbows is fun. If you don’t mind getting wet. You need rain and sunshine. But not every rain and sunshine produce a rainbow.

When can we see a rainbow?

There’s some conditions that needs to be met. First of all, the sun must directly shine to the rain. If there’s clouds in between, the light gets scattered and no rainbow will form. Second, the sun must be less than 42 degrees from the horizon. Otherwise the rainbow will form below the horizon. This applies on a flat ground. If your standing on a mountain, you can see rainbows even if the sun is higher in the sky.

Good conditions for rainbows form when there’s lots of afternoon rain showers coming down from cumulus clouds and some blue sky visible between clouds. You should place yourself to a spot where the rain is going to pass over and where the sun is going to shine at the same time or right after that. So that’s the wet part. But if all of these conditions are met, you are likely to be rewarded with a rainbow. Or maybe even a double rainbow! The size of the rainbow depends on the time of the day, see image below.

Image on the left is taken early in the afternoon and the one on the right is just before sunset.

Camera gear for rainbow photography

Rainbow photography is not very demanding for your camera except for one thing. Weather sealing. It’s highly likely that your camera will get some rain on it so make sure that your camera can handle it or use some kind of rain cover for it. There’s lot of affordable rain covers for sale out there, that will get the job done. But one thing you can’t cover with anything is the front of your lens so keep a good microfiber cloth in your pocket, because you have to wipe those water drops off of your lens constantly. Otherwise your images will have weird dark spots all over it.

Speaking of lenses, what’s the right lens for rainbow photography? I would say standard zoom (24-70mm) for afternoon rainbows and wide zoom (17-28mm) or ultrawide prime (14mm) for those huge late evening rainbows. Check out my camera gear page to see what I use for rainbow photography.

You can get good pictures of rainbows even with modern smartphone camera. And most of them can withstand rain so you don’t have to worry about that. Obviously be sure about that before you get your phone wet. If your phone doesn’t have wide enough lens for the rainbow, you can try to take a panorama of it. Most smartphones have that capability. Just be aware that it can distort the rainbow when it stitches those photos to a panorama, but it might be worth a try.

Photographing rainbows can be very refreshing experience, especially if you get soaked.