Pacific Rim National Park Reserve – that’s our primary Vancouver Island destination. We were both eager to see the coastal rain forest, so that was our first stop of the day. There are just short and easy hikes here and they don’t get much easier than the Rain Forest trail, but photography is just that much harder then. It was a bright sunny day and the light that was filtering through the trees provided nightmarish lighting conditions – photographically speaking, that is. Otherwise it was very beautiful, and in the end I was able to make use the patchy light. You just have to be very quick, because one moment the light is here and the next it’s gone. I did a sequence of pictures and you can see the light changing, even if it’s not even a minute between the frames.
Having done the forest, we headed to the beach. I had been looking forward to it, as I thought that the flotsam would provide endless photo ops. Well, I was partly right – there was some flotsam, and the photo ops… were somewhat limited. Anyway, I did enjoy just walking out there, even if I’m a land-dweller by nature and the big horizon bothers me more than fascinates.
We finished the day by trying to shoot the sunset. That was straight out of the book of do-nots of photography – we had done absolutely zero scouting ahead and we had only minutes to find the right spot. So of course we never got it but just ended up shooting a forest silhouette from the docks at Tofino.
