Lux Gloria: Chasing Conditions in Golden Ears Provincial Park and How to Predict Light Rays for Landscape Photography
- Tristan Todd
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
Light rays are one of those things that every landscape photographer goes nuts for, but actually getting a nice photo of them is easier said than done! Out of all the forest photos in my portfolio, only four of them have light rays, and only one of those five—Lux Gloria—has rays of real significance. And to be clear here, I'm not counting rays created by dust or the spray of rushing water.
So why is it hard to find these epic rays of light, and why is it so hard to photograph them if you get lucky enough? The answer to the first question is simple and complicated at the same time. The simple explanation is that the conditions required for rays to form are very specific. While you can encounter them all year round in the forests around Vancouver, our notoriously wet fall and winter months tend to create the most favourable conditions. Keeping in mind I'm not a meteorologist or physicist, I'm going to do my best to explain this in a very basic way, and help you learn how to predict light rays for landscape photography in the forest.
The fall and winter months are ideal for Vancouver's rainforests because:
there's lots of moisture around;
it's colder, but not too cold;
and very importantly, the colder air gets, the lower its capacity to hold water vapour becomes.
Assuming humidity is high, this means the temperature doesn't have to drop very much for that water vapour to condense, forming dew and fog! This is why your car windows fog up so easily in the winter, especially on the rainy days. But that's not all! Location is also quite important.
For fog to form, you don't want much wind. In the Vancouver area this is more annoying than it sounds, because it rules out a lot of spots. From my experience, mountains generally have places where they're windy more often than not and this can make things tricky because our rainforests are all in mountainous areas. Canyons can really exacerbate this issue, as they are very effective channels for wind. The areas around Nelson Creek and Cypress Creek in West Vancouver are great examples of places where wind can be a problem. I won't pretend to know exactly why, but I'm going to guess it has to do with the proximity to Howe Sound.
There is a place somewhat near Nelson Creek with beautiful arbutus trees that I've been trying to photograph in fog, but after many attempts I've had zero success. The problem? That part of the mountain is always windy. On days with good fog potential, the mountains will hold fog in certain spots while completely preventing it in others. Fog will be happily hanging out 150 metres down the trail, west of the trees, but never actually at the trees where I want it. It essentially gets held in place there by the mountain wind on the eastern side of the fog, and the canyon wind over Nelson Creek on the western side of the fog.
Anyway, I suppose that's a very long-winded way of explaining that location matters... a lot. Golden Ears Provincial Park, particularly down by Alouette Lake, tends to be an amazing place to go searching for those epic rays of light. Fog loves to form here during the cooler months, and since it's usually not too thick when it forms overnight (which can prevent rays), it burns off when the sun comes up, creating beautiful light shows.
I'd been trying to make a decent photo with those famous Golden Ears rays for a couple years now. Before that time I didn't have a car, so I didn't spend much time in the park and chasing rays was simply not going to happen there. After I got my car, luck was not on my side and Golden Ears Parkway kept getting washed out by bad storms during prime fog season!
I made an attempt last fall before storms messed up the road, and though I did get rays, they didn't last for very long and I didn't get a great photo of them. Which brings me to my second point from earlier: it's so hard to photograph the rays because they generally don't just sit around. They move, quickly! And sometimes they simply don't last. Combine that with the chaos of the forest and you may end up literally running around chasing the rays while scrambling to figure out a composition that doesn't totally suck.
Not long after my attempt last autumn, storms damaged the road and it was closed. I was dismayed. But I still kept an eye on the weather, waiting for the right weather setup. This has become one of my favourite parts about landscape photography, even though I traditionally do enjoy winging it and making the best of what I get. Being able to read the weather is a great way to increase your chances of getting the light and conditions you want, and it's really satisfying when you pull it off successfully. Of course you need a bit of luck too, because there's always luck where weather is involved. I highly recommend using SpotWx for hiking and landscape photography. You can set the exact location, switch between different models, and all the information you need is presented in basically the most efficient format possible. No other weather app or website comes close!
Eventually the setup arrived, just after the road was repaired and re-opened. It was basically the perfect setup you want for super good rays: a few rainy days, followed by an overnight clearing and temperature drop with minimal wind, leading into a sunny morning and afternoon. All the numbers looked good, but it's worth keeping in mind that you don't need perfect numbers. The forecast is just a prediction after all, and there's a limit to its granularity. There's always going to be natural variances due to super localized conditions. Don't worry if temperature and dew point aren't supposed to meet, because there's always a chance they actually will.
With that in mind, I made my way out to the park. Not long after I started hiking, the best rays I've ever seen began forming. But not only that, there's something I neglected to mention earlier that is particularly relevant. When you have that type of weather setup with lots of rain immediately followed by lots of sun, something magical happens.
The forest steams.
It's basically the most rainforest-y event ever, and can help make the rays even better. It was incredible, and if you want to get an idea of what I mean, I've included a YouTube video at the end of this blog with footage I captured that morning.
It was a scramble to figure out a shot, even with such huge rays. I played around with a bunch of different composition ideas, such as the photo below. I don't know the name of this phenomenon, but it was by far the best "ray rainbow" I've ever seen:
While the rays stuck around for quite a while, they moved around a lot, making things tricky. I was wandering the Spirea Trail and it is beautiful, with moss carpets everywhere, but I've always found it tough to photograph. It suffers from what other second-growth forests in BC suffer from: lots of small and uniform looking trees. All that moss definitely helps though! As I continued my walk, the rays got even crazier. I tried another composition, but I wasn't quite happy with it due to the tree in the dead centre feeling awkward and demanding too much attention:
I moved on from the composition and turned to face the sun. Two minutes later, "Lux Gloria" was born:
The subject of this composition is definitely the sun and light rays themselves, which was always something I wanted to avoid... but with rays this good I was okay with making an exception. To me it looks like a beautiful explosion of light, like you would see from a wizard's staff or magical being in a movie or video game. I opted to frame the subject with a couple trees on either side. If you know me, you'll know that the natural frame is one of my favourite composition types. Cool-to-warm and rough-to-smooth transitions also helped increase the feeling of depth.
In terms of post-processing, I didn't need to do a ton. I focus stacked with one additional exposure, and made small adjustments to white balance, contrast, saturation, highlights and shadows. After that I did some more selective edits to specific areas of the image: brightening the rays a little bit in a few spots, brightening the moss slightly with luminosity masks, darkening around the side and bottom edges. In the background I also applied some Orton effect to emphasize the softness of the light and build up that dreamy feeling, and in the foreground I nudged a bit of cyan into the midtones. If you want an idea of what this all looked like in person, I recorded some video and audio. With the light rays and birds singing, it was a pretty magical morning.
Anyway, hopefully this blog provided some useful insight that you can apply to your own adventures with landscape photography! I have more "behind the photo" blogs like this planned, so stay tuned and hop on my email newsletter to get notified. And don't hesitate to let me know if there are any particular photos you'd like to know more about!
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