I've taken several pictures of rainbows with my digital camera and never had one turn out to match what my eye sees. The latest was:



Inside the white box was a rather stunning rainbow, as the setting sun shone through ice crystals in the lower atmosphere. I've seen great film pictures of a rainbow (and even taken a couple so-so ones myself), but have had no luck with my digital (Canon S30). Any suggestions?

Full Size image, 1.2 megs, 2048x1536

Picture was taken at F4.0, 1/1000 shutter.

Thanks in advance.

 

i don't know much about photography, but one thing i know, is that i ran into the same problem as u, i tried to take a pic of a rainbow, and it didn't show up.. had to look really closely =-(

 

It's going be difficult to get the results that you want using a point and shoot (PAS) digital. The PAS digital cameras do automatic color, contrast, and saturation adjustments and then sharpen the image too boot. As a result, its hard to get a repeatable result at landscape distances. You just never know what the metering system is using for the gray point (used to adjust white balance).

If you have some experience with photography, and your camera has a manual setting, you could set the shot to under-expose by about 1/3 - 1/2 stop. Then make the needed adjustments in Photoshop.

You should really ask this question over at dpreview (Canon Forum): http://www.dpreview.com/forums/forum.asp?forum=1010

It's kind of like the s2ki.com board....except with cameras. You'll find many very helpful people.

Cheers -

 

After looking at your image again....your rainbow never stood a chance. The camera had an extreme white point (setting sun on the left) the black point in the shadows at the right, and the gray point in the cloud just above the rainbow. The metering system responded with a VERY contrasty image at the expense of color saturation.

Don't feel bad, rainbows are hard subjects to photograph!

Cheers -

 

Thanks for the info. I posted on the dpreview site, I'll see what they say.

 

The background is very important, I took this in the Rainbow state a couple of years ago. My fiancee (at the time, now my wife) insisted that you couldn't photograph a rainbow. In case anybody is wondering this was taken on Pali Highway in Honolulu.


I just wanted to post this second picture for shits and giggles. This is the view from our honeymoon suite this past November on Maui. If you enlarge it you can see the little bird flying in the bottom left of the picture.