Somewhere over the rainbow

Somewhere over the rainbow…the sun is hiding, perhaps. I am not kidding when I say that I haven’t seen the sun in almost three weeks. Well, it comes out once in a blue moon after the rain, but always for a very short period of time and always behind heavy, grey clouds. What I ought to say is that I have forgotten what blue sky looks like 😦 Oh Glasgow, must you do this to me?

I guess you win some and you lose some, or the other way around. If there is no rain, then who could experience and appreciate the beauty of the rainbow? Thinking of this made me realize that rainbows are one of my favourite things to photograph, though I obviously don’t have as many photos of rainbows as I would have liked since it depends a lot on timing. Still, here is a compilation of some of my favourite rainbow scenes captured throughout the past years.

I can’t stress enough my NEED to get a window seat when I travel on a plane. The only exception is when I have to make a connecting flight within a short period of time, in which case I would compromise and go for an aisle seat. Then I would miss views like this. It was raining as the plane took off from Glasgow last December, and without high expectations of seeing anything glorious, I looked outside the window, just in time to see the opposite of the expected – a semi-rainbow hanging from the sky. Perhaps then, I loved rain a little bit more, even if it were just for a split moment.

Another rainbow seen in Glasgow, this time an arc so wide and so majestic that I wasn’t able to capture it in its entirety with my phone. And there’s that very faint secondary hiding just above the primary arc, trying not to outshine its companion.

This photo was from the early days of when I started using a digital camera. In fact it was taken with the first digital camera I ever owned, the Canon PowerShot S500, which I bought in 2005. What better place to see a rainbow than at Niagara Falls, arguably the most well-known tourist destination in Canada? You know, it almost seemed as if you could walk from Canada to the USA via this Rainbow Road…Mario Kart reference, maybe? 😉

When this photo was taken, it was 7:30pm. I stepped out of the lab not a moment too late to catch this gigantic rainbow right outside IECB. God is so amazing. One moment I was frustrated at having to dodge the rain and within two minutes the sky opened up, sent me a rainbow as a gift, and the sun chased away the dark clouds, bringing the rainbow with it. Still, the two minutes were golden.

On a scorching day with a temperature of 35°C, no outdoor activity seemed any appealing, even in Paris. Thankfully, the fountains at Trocadéro were in full blast, bringing with them unexpected streaks of colour and inviting people to jump in the water and enjoy a moment of cooling down in the heatwave. I wasn’t in the appropriate attire to jump in, or else I would have done so.

I had almost forgotten this encounter with a rainbow in Interlaken until I dug through my old photos. Faint but noticeable, it appeared quietly and humbly in the distance, not screaming for attention like some of the other ones I’ve seen. Still a pleasant surprise 😉

The bottom shot of this rainbow is a magnified version of the top image, taken on the way to sushi in Toronto (sometimes I amaze myself by remembering minor details). I wonder if there is a pot of gold in that building, where the end of the rainbow seemed to be in sight. Or maybe someone was shooting out rainbow-coloured lasers from that building…

Louvain-la-Neuve, or Belgium in general, is another place where you see a lot of rain. Then again, after coming to Glasgow, I’m convinced that what I thought was “a lot of rain” in Belgium was really child’s play compared to the UK. At the time I took this photo, I wrote this: “It’s been raining intermittently since the morning till early afternoon. At around 4pm, I looked out my window and this sight welcomed me. Immediately I gasped and said “wow” out loud to the gorgeous full rainbow that appeared right in front of me. The field of view of my lens wasn’t wide enough to capture the entire arc, but what a beauty!”

Finally, a double rainbow from a place that was so close to my heart for the past few years – my little studio apartment across the Palais de Justice in Bordeaux. At the end of the day, you gotta endure a storm to see the rainbow. Bring it on, Glaswegian weather!