In autumn, most of Yosemite’s famous waterfalls are just not falling. There’s not enough water at that time of year to feed them. Which is unfortunate for landscape photographers, because falling water always bring the potential for striking and often meaningful images. When we had passed Bridalveil Fall a day earlier, it appeared to be dry. Yet when we returned the next day, it was not only flowing with water, but more importantly, it was actually in the process of forming a rainbow near its base. Bridalveil can make a rainbow very briefly and only once every 24 hours, when light hits the falling water at a perfect angle. I zoomed in with a 432mm telephoto lens to stress just that part of the fall where the rainbow seemed to be forming. (I took many shots, as most photographers do, of the entire waterfall as it threaded down the side of a huge cliff, but that distant vantage point reduced the size of the potential rainbow to inconsequential size.) When I returned from my shoot and brought the images up on my laptop screen, I saw for the first time what I had accomplished. I had photographed a tapestry of light and color (that’s what a rainbow is, right?) capturing the essence of this phenomenon, and also stimulating the imagination of the viewer. The water appears (appropriately enough) as a translucent veil, a gossamer sheet of purple green, gold and red descending between a diagonal flow of green trees and deep reddish brown rocks. A flare of light strikes the veil at the upper right, as if to signal that a magical event is about to take place. There are even diagonal areas of black coming out of each of the lower corners, giving coherence to the entire image. And yes, this really is a landscape, because it captures an aspect of nature at work on the land.