For many of us, a huge factor affecting our photography can be forest fire smoke, usually with a big dose of sizzling hot temperatures and devastating drought to boot. Those clear blue skies that we are used to in our neck of the woods have been hard to find. Instead, smoke haze can range from a nuisance to air so thick that you’re hard pressed to see more than a kilometre away. Sometimes the sky seems reasonably clear but the setting sun often disappears into a smoke bank near the horizon.

So what’s a poor photographer to do? Pack up the camera and wait until next year or try to make the best of a challenging situation? While forest fire smoke is the last thing we want to see, it does present some interesting photo possibilities and opportunities for creativity. Smoke sometimes appears similar to fog, so you can often achieve a similar look as in fog photography.

Perhaps the most promising potential is photographing the sun, which often has a surreal appearance as smoke dims the bright glare. If there’s no clouds on the horizon, you might catch a brilliant sky as the sun slowly sets. Similarly, the moon, especially when it is low in the sky near moonrise and moonset, can have some unexpected colours when it peeks through the smoke.

The moral of the story is not to stop photographing. No one wants forest fires, but why not make the best of a bad situation by trying to capture the unusual and sometimes even attractive aspects of this phenomenon? The following are a few images that we were able to get both this summer and at other times when faced with fires and smoke.

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