Rainbows are always a beautiful sight. The end of this one has no pot of gold, instead it has the Fountain Hills fountain. The rainbow in this photograph is a result of the downward raining water from the fountain in the central park of Fountain Hills, Arizona. The fountain can shoot water as high as 560 feet, but normally operates at around 300 feet. I took this photo at 3:05pm Arizona time on 13 November 2004, so the sun was low enough to create this well placed rainbow.
Rainbows are created by sunlight passing through the water droplets and reflecting off the back side of them. As the light passes into and out of the water it gets refracted which disperses the light into its component colors. The water droplets act as both a mirror and a prism to create the colors you see.
I used my Minolta DiMAGE A1 digital camera for this photograph. The exposure was 1/1000 of a second at f/5.6 with the camera set for ISO 100 in RAW mode. The lens focal length was set to 31.9mm which is equivalent to about 127mm on a 35mm film camera. I used Adobe Photoshop CS to perform the raw conversion and processing. Photograph by Rick Scott.
Updated: 15 November 2004