End o' the Rainbow

July, August, and September are the "monsoon" months in the southwestern deserts of the United States. Days often start out clear and sunny, but as the heat builds during the day, so do the clouds. Eventually there may be rain, light or heavy, in the afternoon and evening. Because the storms are transient in nature, cloud breaks occasionally allow sunlight to illuminate the passing rain to create some dramatic rainbows. At sunset, these high-arching rainbows are particularly rich in the warmer colors of the spectrum, mirroring the warm light that is a hallmark at this time of day.

This image was taken from a roadside pullout about 10 miles north of Kayenta, Arizona just before sunset. The glowing peak at the left end of the rainbow is known as "Agathla Peak" on topo maps and locally as "El Capitan" or "El Cap." According to the topo map, it rises over 400 feet above the surrounding land. Geologically, it is a lava plug, the erosional remnants of the throat of a volcano that solidified around 27 million years ago (thanks Wipideia).

My 28-200 lens wouldn't cover this field of view, so instead, this scene is six vertical exposures taken at 40-mm focal length stitched together. (Thanks Paolo De Faveri for your nearly constant posting of stitched cloud scenes which convinced me to try stitching here.) I don't have a panorama plate for my tripod or stitching software, but PS, did a pretty decent job, I think. I used Edit>Transform>Warp to fit the stitched image to the standard 3:2 aspect ratio, with some additional warping to align the rainbow where the frames didn't quite match.

I've tried photographing El Cap for nearly 25 years. This is the first time I've tried printing one of the images, and I'm not going to say it was easy. I've included a link to the Photoshopping of this image below. It ended up being a bit rambling as I tried to get everything right and it's one of those images where objectivity probably got lost in the effort follow the light. Your thoughts and suggestions would as always be appreciated.

Canon 5D2, 28-200 lens. Full Photoshop disclosure on how this image was processed can be found at the bottom of this page.