Mara Rainbow

Mara Rainbow

 

In the Masai Mara the dry season is not actually dry, thunderstorms are quite common especially in the evening. I had wanted to see a mighty African thunderstorm for quite some time, especially now that I live in Finland where this is a very rare phenomenon. Well, my wishes were granted and we had thunderstorms every day in the Mara! Usually they occurred when we were back in camp but on this occasion the thunderstorm started earlier when we were about 30mins away from camp – and it swooshed in literally in a matter of minutes! What an awesome sight! The sky was really dark and then the lovely afternoon sun managed to push through a gap in the clouds behind this scene creating a lovely rainbow. The contrast between the golden light & the dark skies was just surreal.

Looking at the techs below some might question why I didn’t use a wide angle lens to capture the scene.  I wanted the rainbow to take up a lot of area in the photo for more impact and drama, using a wide angle lens resulted in the rainbow looking too thin for my liking.  Furthermore the long lenses tend to compress items in the image, making them look closer together than they actually are.  In this case it makes the rainbow look very close to the foreground, an effect which I was hoping for.

Techs: Canon 7D | Canon 300 2.8 IS II | f6.3 | 1/250 | ISO 200