We didn’t get much rain tonight, but we did get a rainbow!  I noticed it and ran to get the wide-angle lens.  When I went outside, I was happy to find that I could see almost the full rainbow, and it was actually a double rainbow.  I worked quickly, because the light was changing very fast.  My wide angle lens on my 7D body didn’t have a chance of capturing the whole image, so I had to do a panorama.  The light was low, and the contrast was high, so I needed to do HDR.  So I set the camera in manual mode, metering off the sky and setting a large f-number so that I would have a good depth of focus.  Then I put the lens into manual focus mode, so that the focus plane would stay consistent as I moved the camera.  I set the camera to bracket the exposures +/- 2EV for the HDR.  I didn’t have time to grab the tripod, so I did my best to hand-hold and keep the camera horizontal to the ground as I panned.  It’s important to remember to allow a lot of overlap between images when doing panoramas.  Then at the computer, I combined each set of HDR frames first, being careful to use the same settings for each one.  Then I finally let Photoshop stitch together my panorama.  I turned up the vibration and saturation a bit, then I had to edit the edges (don’t look too closely at the rosebush on the left! :)) to get a full rectangular image.

So somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly…

Does that mean that we’ll have bluebirds visiting soon!? :)