When it Rains it Pours

On the West Coast of British Columbia it can really rain at times, making it a challenge to get out and photograph especially if one is using a view camera like myself. I had a very memorable trip to Pacific Rim National Park on Vancouver Island in October of 2003, on the day of the drive up to the park it was a torrential down pour of water from the heavens like something I have never seen in my life. I knew if it kept raining like it was that I would be doing very little view camera landscape photography, I was not really too concerned, I was more fascinated than anything else with the unbelievable amount of rain falling, all along Highway 4 between Port Alberni and Ucluelet there were hundreds of waterfalls of various sizes cascading down from the mountains above. The next day the weather cleared somewhat and I had a wonderful time over two full days capturing on film the misty, foggy and mysterious coast of Vancouver Island, including the image posted of South Beach, said to be one of the favourite spots of Group of Seven painter Arthur Lismer. The rain was also a welcome relief to myself for other reasons, I reside in B.C.'s south central Okanagan area and it had been a very hot and dry summer that year, with very little rain. The dry conditions caused a lot of forest fires of historic proportions in B.C.'s interior region and as a photographer for the Kelowna's newspaper, The Daily Courier, I photographed a gigantic forest fire ( big by Canadian standards ) which saw 235 homes destroyed by flames. During that time there were many days when the air was thick with fog like smoke in addition to the heat and I was thinking how nice it would be to have a down pour of rain at that very moment but as with all things in nature nothing is on demand, so when it finally did rain, it really did pour.