Full Garden Spraybow


How to get a complete rainbow in your garden. All you need is for the sun to be high enough and to spray water over a wide enough area. For taking pictures a completely calm day helps otherwise it is quite hard to keep the camera dry. If you don't mind getting wet then getting into the spray helps, when the spray drops are very close you can get overlapping bows, one for each eye.

Full garden spraybow

The full rainbow is so big that a very wide angle lens is needed to get it all in.

This is a composite of 8 images with a wide angle lens, it spans about 110 degrees horizontally.


The primary bow is complete except for the section blocked off by my own shadow. The gap in the lowest part of the bow appears wider than the shadow on the ground because of perspective. The secondary bow is only partly visible where it shows up against the shadow of the hedge on the left. The brighter region inside the bow is quite obvious here too. There is also some heiligenschein from the wet grass near the shadow of my head.


Canon EOS 20D    24th May 2009
Wiltshire, England

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