If anyone in New Zealand was going to photograph a rare supernumerary rainbow this year it was probably going to be me. Not through any special talent or skill on my behalf, mainly because Brett Phibbs and Lottie Hedley cursed me with it at the recent Photo Aotearoa workshop in Ngaruawhia.
As part of the workshop we were each given a subject to shoot a photo story on. My subject was Monica Knight, an amazing local farmer living on the banks of the Waikato River. The first photo I snapped with her featured her framed by a rainbow. It was done as a homage to a famous photo of Lydia Ko that Brett shot featuring the golfer framed by a vibrant rainbow. At the photo review that evening Lottie and Brett joked with me that I didn’t need to shoot anymore rainbows over the next few days.
Naturally I proceeded to shoot literally every rainbow I saw and the joke became that I had a rainbow filter on my camera. It got so bad that I named my project “gumboots and rainbows”.
Since the workshop I’ve made a point of snapping rainbows and tagging Brett and Lottie on instagram just to remind them of my new found curse.
I hadn’t even heard of a supernumerary rainbow when I photographed one on the Taranaki coast in early July.
After a quick drone flight off the beach I started walking back to my car when a sudden rain shower drenched me. Just as it passed, a huge bright double rainbow appeared in front of me and I pulled my camera out and snapped a few photos.
As I went to put my camera away I noticed what at first seemed to be an especially thick rainbow further up the coast. Using my 70-200mm I zoomed in and could see that it was actually a band of multiple rainbows unlike anything I’d ever seen before.
A quick google search at home lead me to believe it was a rare supernumerary rainbow. I shared it to social media and it went ballistic.
Within the space of a few hours it had amassed thousands more likes than any of my previous photos and the media requests started pouring in. As I slept that night media requests came in from weather.com (the largest weather website in the world) and a bunch of television stations in the USA asking to share it on their news programmes. Not bad for my first 48hrs in Taranaki!
