While the spray was heavy enough to make life miserable for the photographer, it unfortunately didn't spread wide enough for a good moonbow. But I was happy to capture even this little bit. (060C-54378)

I had been trying to see and photograph the moonbow at Rainbow Falls for some 25 years. In 2010, I finally got a shot.

A moonbow is different from a rainbow only in that the refracted and reflected light comes from the moon instead of the sun. Most anywhere that you can see a daytime rainbow (technically, a spraybow) at a waterfall, you can also see a moonbow if the conditions are just right. The right conditions at Rainbow Falls on Horsepasture River are a lot of water to produce heavy spray, and a clear night within a couple days of the full moon.

Trouble was, these conditions happened to come together when the temperature was 15 degrees and the only position from where I could see the moonbow was standing directly in the brunt of the heavy spray. For forty-five minutes I stood in that spray making 20-second exposures. After the first two or three shots, the lens had cooled enough for the spray to freeze on the front element of the lens.

My routine was to make the exposure, swing the camera around so it faced me (I kept the pan base of the ball head loosened so I could quickly swing it), breathe heavily on the lens to melt the ice and warm it enough so I could wipe the water off before it refroze, make adjustments in exposure or focusing, quickly swing the lens back around and shoot again. A tedious and painful affair with my frozen fingers.

The reason I shot so many exposures was because after a few shots I became concerned about the focus. I just couldn’t seem to get it right, no matter what I tried. The waterfall was far enough away that I figured infinity focus would suffice, so more than once I took the camera off the tripod, autofocused on the moon behind me and taped the ring in place. But when I magnified the image on the LCD it never looked totally sharp. So, I kept making adjustments, bracketing focus just as I might bracket exposure back in the film days.

After forty-five minutes I was too cold and frustrated to continue. A layer of ice covered my clothes, tripod, and camera. I left not knowing if I had captured a suitable shot.

The next day, while sitting at the computer, I got my answer. I had a couple decent shots; everything else was crap. Then it finally dawned on me what was happening with the focus. I was focusing properly, but once the spray froze on the lens, it created a sort of diffusion filter. The only shots that worked were the ones I made before the lens had cooled down. The spray made the image a little soft, but not nearly as much as the thin layer of ice.

How about that?! I could have walked away after a few minutes instead of becoming a frozen ice sculpture!