“Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.”

• Guillaume Apollinaire

Another day left work a bit early to enjoy well enjoy part of the day of course. I was out and about and searching for cool places to capture clouds and the Illinois Prairie. The cool thing as I was driving about was the fact that you could see it raining from some of the clouds that passed. Rain that most likely was not hitting the ground as sometimes it does not do. I was photographing a cloud formation to the west and as I was going to get back into my truck, I saw this thin rainbow on the horizon and this cloud formation and  the near perfect lighting and I snapped away.

I once believed, because I was jokingly told, very early on in my photographic career, we are talking high school age, that you could not photograph a rainbow. That the rainbow cannot be captured, much like the Leprechaun and the pot of gold. I know how silly that sounds now but it was a valuable lesson. Because I of course had seen rainbows in photographs, and wondered what was up. The lesson was light, if you can see it, you can photograph it. Photography is not about picking up a camera, pointing and shooting. It is about so many things that it truly has to be a life long passion, a quest for learning and knowledge, a willingness to find and do new things with photography. It is also about practice, because you have to know what happens to your exposure when you change the “film” speed in relationship to changing the aperture, in relation to the shutter speed.

You also have to know how color works, and I will say I benefited quite a whole bunch from taking all of those Noritsu trainings on how to use their photographic lab machines. Lots of wasted photo paper back then, as you looked at the negative, made a guess, made a print, and then adjusted based on what you saw when the print came out. That did advance to a system where you saw a positive on a screen and made adjustments which saved a bit of paper. Of course Photoshop saves quite a bit of paper, providing you have high quality calibrated equipment and an understanding of how color and light works. Photoshop also allowed me to combine and create a 9 shot panoramic of a Rainbow that Hangs in my favorite restaurant, Rays’ Place in Hennepin. Just remember this is my story inspired and your story will be different for sure. Enjoy!