For years my role as a photojournalist has been to capture images as they happen and to be prepared for anything.
Last night, while my husband and I were enjoying the Calgary Stampeders and Winnipeg Blue Bombers CFL game, the skies opened up as a cloud passed over and the showers began to fall. The weather here in Alberta has been a little off all week with severe thunderstorms, reports of tornadoes but also beautiful sunshine. Mother nature seems to be having problems making up her mind about what weather to hand us.
As we were sitting in the sunny rain shower a beautiful rainbow appeared arching from side to side over the stadium and I knew I had to capture it. Confession time, I shot it on panorama setting on my iPhone. It was the only camera I had with me since we were fans and I wasn’t on the sidelines shooting the game. What I captured was a stunning image of the packed stadium with the cascading rain and rainbow glowing above.
With this image in hand, I knew I had to share this image and decided to post it on Twitter. I have not been overly active on the social media platform in the past six months. I have tried recently to change that by starting to share again. As I sat in the stands I was amazed as I watched the live impressions that photo received going up and up as well as the number of shares constantly climbing. This by far is the largest interaction I have had since relaunching my career. Looking back at my impression rates on Twitter before January, the biggest stories I had tweeted about – the Westjet Blue Santa Cross Canada Trip, the fire at the Stadium Shopping Centre and the missing child search in Blairmore were my top tweets. This simple photo of a rainbow is almost up there with those three big news items I covered last year.
So I guess what this shows me is that you never know when you will find the gem of an image and what sharing it with the world will do.
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