Salted Morning Rainbow

Death Valley National Park lies about 2 h9ours north of Las Vegas, Nevada.

This is a horizontal panorama of vertical 14mm shots. To maximize control over contrast and light, I captured three bracketed exposures of each image, then combined them using Adobe Lightroom's "HDR Panorama" function.

A rainbow forms in showers of virga over the salt flats in Badwater Basin, Death Valley National Park, during our landscape and night photography workshop there a couple of weeks ago.

We woke before dawn to intermittent rains drops that morning, and we drove 40 miles toward the wall of black storm, counting on it to move or break up a bit. We stopped at a spot near, but not under it.

The entire view toward the rising sun was obscured with rain a short while earlier, then we had a small glowing window of sunrise light underneath, then we turned around to rainbows from the rising sun shooting over the clouds!

This image was taken just as the sun was reaching our position, you can see a trace of my shadow as the sun crested the clouds behind me.