O2 Arena double rainbow

A few years ago I lived in a flat right on the Thames near Canary Wharf, directly opposite the O2 Arena (née Millenium Dome) on the other side of the river. I'd enjoy walks along the still-quite-industrial docks on a regular basis and every now and then catch some cool weather from my balcony and rush down to take photos.

On this day in April 2012, an almighty storm suddenly swept across London and I happened to be working from home. As the worst of the storm passed overhead I stayed indoors watching the dramatic display and then, as the storm began to ease, decided to grab my camera and raincoat and rush outside to take some pictures.

I'm so glad I did, as what awaited me down by the river was a glorious double rainbow and awesome contrasting light as the sun forced its way through the broken storm clouds.

I had my 5D Mark II with the 24-105mm f4.0L lens so took as many shots as I could while the rainbows stuck around, auto-bracketing to be sure to cover the dynamic lighting range and covering a panoramic sweep from a few different viewing points around East India Dock. Looking back at the raw files today, I took 249 shots and there are still some really nice ones I've never gone back to process; they've now been added to my 'unprocessed' queue in Lightroom to remind me to work on them one day (it's already been 4 years, what's an undefined extra bit of time between friends?).

Behind the panorama

In the end, I didn't need the bracketed frames as the middle exposures covered the light just fine. I merged around 10 frames to panorama in Photoshop (covering a roughly 180-degree view) and then processed in Lightroom to pull the colour and details back out from the raw data.

By the time I was done, I had this massively wide panorama:

Once I'd got this far though, it was clear that I really didn't need a lot of the stuff on the right-hand side: the slightly blown-out sky, large buildings and small glimpse of railing and pathway are just a distraction from the real interest—the weather crossing the O2 Arena and double rainbow.

Cropping those bits out to pull the O2 Arena into the centre of the frame heroes the building while drawing the eye left to the double rainbow and break of bright sky to outline the still-under-construction Emirates Air Line cable car towers; on the right of the image I kept just enough to show that clearer skies are pushing across towards the O2 from the West.

I've published this photo on Flickr, Google+ (ha!) and 500px in the past, though not here on the blog oddly. It's certainly one of the most dramatic photographs I think I've taken and it's a personal favourite. Coming back to it now, I'm tempted to have a go at a 'redux' post-processing with newer pano tools and a bit more experience but actually, I think I'll leave it alone.

I'm still pretty happy with this one four years later, which doesn't happen often.