Rainbows
Rim Rock Trail/Pounds Hollow/Southern Illinois/50 MM 1.8/natural lighting/manual
Something really funny happened in Illinois while on vacation. It’s been happening more and more lately and I can’t explain it. I was walking up a set of stairs that ascended into (what looked like total Utopia) a plateau; it looked like Eden it was so beautiful. I took a step, inhaled deeply, looked up, smiled and as I took my next step (snapping pics along the way) a rainbow formed right in front of me. There was no rainbow there previously or afterwards. It lasted less than two seconds and in the blink of an eye it was gone. I’ve been a photographer for close to a decade. I’ve taken hundreds of thousands of pictures and most of them have been in all manual. I know lighting and exposure better than my own skin and can explain away lens flares and apparition-like smudges with a sound, technological explanation. The rainbows? They’re very real. This has happened to me at least five times over the past few months and it’s always been when I’m out somewhere communing with God. It’s like He’s giving me a hug and it’s the most amazing thing ever because it’s so candid and unexpected. I know what my eyes see in every scene and I can manipulate my scenes to look any way I want via the aperture and shutter speed, ISO, etc. But I can’t insert rainbows into the frame with the flip of the wrist or camera-trickery. It’s a very special thing lately!
I took a quick selfie earlier because the light in the kitchen was so bright and I knew it would make a good high keyed shot where my facial features would fade out into the light and appear minimal. (I don’t consider this “good photography” by any means but experimental.) I didn’t alter the hues of my eyes at all- just kicked up the sat. a bit; the colours are real though. I’ve never noticed that I have rainbow coloured eyes- every colour of the spectrum can be seen in them. This too is a new thing as my eyes have always been “just green”. But lately, there’s a deep, red fire burning right in the center of them…
m o n o c h r o m e j u n k i e † 