Banff 2017 - Day 4 Part 2
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BANFF 2017 - DAY 4 PART 2
Arcs and Snow
Link to full sized imaged: http://www.tom-hill.biz/Galleries/Scenics/Canada/i-fR5NSJn/A
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This was my last full day in Banff and it didn't disappoint.
After spending the whole morning shooting images with Lake Louise as the main subject--See images from "Banff 2017 - Day 4 Part 1"--I thought I was done for the morning. While packing away my gear in the car in the parking lot I saw the sundog just above the trees. I've only seen this when it was particularly cool and with the right mixture of ice/moisture in the air combined with clear, calm weather. While seeing a sundog is neat enough, I was completely surprised to see a colorful arc around the sun. While I've seen plenty of these arcs up north, it's rare for me to see colorful ones like this. But, there was more, there were two halo's around the sun. A double halo. That's special.
This article as a good description of these halos:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/22%C2%B0_halo
It seems there are 22 deg and 46 deg halos. These two halos can combine to make it look like there's a double rainbow around the sun. Remember, classic rainbows associated with rain showers are seen facing away from the sun. What you're seeing here is towards the sun, the opposite direction from where you look for regular rainbows.
I spent a least hour in the parking lot trying different compositions hoping to get something unique. The really tight shots of the sundog with the trees were my favorites. But, I realized they would've been too abstract to really connect to people. That connection can be really important to the success of images. The first picture here looks like a classic rainbow which is an easy connection for most people. Having the rainbow with the icy mountains and snow is a bit unusual.
Sundog Detail
Link to full sized image: http://www.tom-hill.biz/Galleries/Scenics/Canada/i-gLjZmfD/A
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This second image was one of my attempts at capturing one of the sundogs I saw.
A good description of a sundog can be found here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_dog
These are a photographic challenge because the range of light from bright to dark is so broad. While the scenes are easy to see with your eye-ball, the huge dynamic range is well beyond what most camera sensors can capture. Clever photographic tricks are required to capture some of that range to give a chance for the image to look something like what we can normallysee. In this case, I simply adjusted the tonal qualities of the sky separately from the trees in the foreground using my editing tools.
Sundogs and Halos
Link to Full-sized Image: http://www.tom-hill.biz/Galleries/Scenics/Canada/i-8J4fGDh/A
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This last image was an attempt at capturing the whole phenomenon. Since the halos were so wide--more than 100 degrees of field of view--I couldn't capture it with a single shot from my camera. Instead, I used several images to make this final panoramic.
Interesting, the version of this scene I made with the panoramic feature in my iPhone is pretty darn good. It also was a whole lot easier to make. While I'm super glad I captured this scene with my ginormously expensive camera and lenses, I would've been completely happy with the results if all I had was my phone.
Cheers
Tom