A local photographer captured stunning images of a rare weather event sometimes referred to as a ‘white rainbow’.
Given the name due to its similarity to a rainbow, it appears as a bow in fog rather than rain. Due to the very small size of water droplets that cause fog, the fog bow has only weak colours, but with a red outer edge and a blue inner edge.
Local photographer Tim Fisher caught the very rare phenomenon on camera.
“I was up early and in the gallery from 6.30am, situated halfway up St John Street in Keswick, I look southwest and west out to Cat Bells and Causey Pike, which are clearly visible from the third-floor staff room,” said Tim.
“The cloud initially was just sitting two miles away, effectively obscuring all the hills/fells which left the foreground beautifully lit, Keswick was getting lit from over Walls Crag down into the valley and it was looking really very beautiful.
“Since I’m quite used to seeing the progress, the organic evolution of a cloud inversion, I watched it for a while because it was beautiful, went to make a cup of tea, came back, went to the top of the gallery to the fourth floor and took my cameras with me and just stood and watched for about 10 minutes.
“As with all these things, I of course have the wrong lens on the front of the camera so when the lighting started to change and we are clearly having some form of rainbow or fog both develop, the camera lens was simply not wide enough, so instead of going for a landscape I rotate of the camera through -90° and handheld, as best I could, took single images such that they overlap starting at the left-hand side of the fog bow moving round to the right.
“The actual fogbow lasted no more than perhaps three or four minutes, but it wasn’t immediately apparent to me what was happening until the very tail end of the sequence, indeed, I attempted to do another sequential set of images that show really next to nothing so I caught the fog at its death knell.
“That’s when I had to get to work, stitching the images and there is very little if any postproduction other than the basics within the image, it just wasn’t necessary.
“The camera itself is known for its truthful rendering of colour, my images are never overblown nor overworked, that is something of a heinous crime as far as professional photographers are concerned.”
