I remember standing by the lakeside, watching this quiet scene unfold: a weathered wooden dock stretching gently across rippling pale-blue water, beneath a dark, textured sky that seemed to invite a moment of stillness. Along the dock, I noticed a tall lamp post, a red life preserver, mooring poles, a coiled metal ladder, and even a small broom-like object near the edge—subtle signs that people had recently passed through, though the place felt utterly calm. Then my eyes were drawn to a vivid, rainbow-like arc of refracted light glowing above the water near the center, an ethereal focal point that brought a soft sense of hope into the muted, vintage-toned scene, with the dock quietly grounding everything in reality.
The image shows a full-circle rainbow, captured over a pier and a lakeside landscape during rainfall, something I had never seen before and have never seen again, a rare view that many people never get to witness. Rainbows are, by their optical nature, always perfect circles, a quiet reminder to me that even when we only see a part of something, there is often more wholeness than meets the eye. From the ground, we usually don’t see this phenomenon in its entirety, because the ground and the horizon hide the lower part, making the rainbow appear only as an arc. In this moment, however, a full circle formed thanks to raindrops that were exceptionally close to where I was standing, allowing me a more complete glimpse of this gentle natural wonder.
Why I saw this was the low October sunlight shines directly from behind me and there is a very dense rainfall right between me and the pier, the light has time to refract and reflect back also from the raindrops lower in the air before they hit the ground or the water. In this case, the entire 360-degree circle becomes visible in front of the photographer.
