Canberra has a knack for rainbows. Our rain often blows through in a couple of hours, and the cloud usually sits over just one part of the city, so the sun breaks back through while it is still drizzling somewhere nearby. That combination is exactly what makes a rainbow, which is why locals seem to catch one after another.
There is a simple rule that helps you find them. A rainbow always appears in the part of the sky opposite the sun, so if you want to know where to look, put the sun at your back. The lower the sun sits, the higher and wider the arc, which is why the biggest, most dramatic rainbows turn up in early morning or late afternoon. Around midday the sun is too high and the arc barely clears the horizon.
The photograph here was a lucky one. Not only did a full arc form, but a fainter second rainbow appeared above it, and both framed one of Canberra's most striking buildings, the Margaret Whitlam Pavilion at the National Arboretum. That upper arc is a genuine second rainbow, formed when sunlight reflects twice inside the raindrops rather than once. The extra bounce makes it dimmer and quietly reverses its colours, so the order runs the opposite way to the main bow.
That brings me to composition. When you have an arc, or two, look for a strong focal point and place it dead centre beneath them. Rainbows are symmetrical, so here symmetry is your friend rather than something to avoid. The pavilion sitting in the middle gives the eye an anchor and ties the whole scene together.
My camera that day was simply my phone. For an easy result, turn the phone to portrait orientation and use panorama mode, sweeping slowly from one side to the other. The trick is to keep the horizon perfectly level as your hand moves; tilt it and the join goes wonky.
For a sharper result, switch your phone to raw at its highest resolution and take a series of frames by hand, overlapping each one by about a third. Around ten frames is plenty. Later you stitch them together on a computer, which holds far more detail than the phone's built-in panorama. This image came out at roughly 70 megapixels, big enough for a canvas print up to 1.5 metres wide.
So next time the rain clears and the sun drops low, turn your back to it and look up. And don't underestimate the phone in your pocket.
Jacky Lee is a photographic artist based in Canberra, born in Hong Kong, with thirty years behind the camera. He works in Intentional Camera Movement and named two methods within it, Intentional Focus Movement and Intentional Parallax Movement. He chairs the AI & Authorship Standards Subcommittee of the Australian Photographic Society, and is an Ambassador of the International Association of Art Photographers for 2026.
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