The Northern Lights put on quite a show the night before last. Scientists are getting pretty good at predicting them, so we knew that there was a good chance of seeing them from where we live. We went out at dusk and drove through some isolated back roads that took us a bit farther away from the city lights than where we live. Although our village is small and we don’t have much light pollution, we are so close to the big city of Vancouver, BC that there is always a bit of light on the horizon to our north. However, I am not a night person and we were just a bit early for the main display. I got up yesterday and looked at the posts of my friends on social media and saw a number of brilliant photographs, including one that showed our bay with the moon over the water and the Aurora reflecting on the water’s surface.

i was a it disappointed, but I have been able to see the lights many times in the course of my life and there will be plenty of other opportunities to view them. Despite my habit of rising to write in my journal in the wee hours, I am not one for staying up late at night. I know that some of my friends who got a good view of the lights are night owls who are used to staying up later than I.

One comment I will make, however, is that unlike many natural phenomena, the Northern Lights photograph pretty well. One thing that we photographers are aware of is how difficult it is to accurately capture colors in our images. I take a lot of sunrise pictures and I know that what I see with my eyes is often quite a bit different than what shows up in my photographs. Sunrises, sunsets and the Aurora Borealis happen to be phenomena that produce dramatic photographs, often resulting in images that feature brighter colors than the actual experience. The Aurora is predominantly green when viewed above, with a bit of pink and purple around the edges. In the photographs pink and purple are often the dominant colors. The camera uses a different process capturing the image than our eyes use. Our eyes dilate in low light situations, opening the pupils to allow more light to enter. A photographer can control the aperture in a complex camera mimicking the effect, but most automatic cameras, including the ones built into cell phones use longer exposure times or, in the case of cell phones, computational processes to combine multiple photographs into a single image. The result is brilliant colors in the photograph but what is really a composite of several different moments into a single image.

My explanation is a bit fuzzy, but if you think about it, you’ll agree that colors are often a bit different in a photograph than in actual experience. That doesn’t make a photograph and less of a treasure, but it does make some of us a bit more critical of photographs, knowing that they tell only part of the story. Having said that, I am sure that I will take advantage of other predictions of the lights to be out and about in the middle of the night and you can be sure I’ll have a camera with more than one lens along for the adventure.

Among the images that I spent time looking at yesterday are images from Fort Nelson, BC. I’ve never been to Fort Nelson, though it is one of the places I hope to one day visit. People used to the United States, even those who live in some of the largest states, often make the mistake of thinking of Canada as being a bit smaller than it is. British Columbia starts just a short distance from our home, but it extends north for a long distance. And beyond B.C. are Yukon and Northwest Territories. Fort Nelson is a thousand miles from Vancouver. Even in the state of my birth, Montana, things that are a thousand miles away are in another state.

Fort Nelson is the home of indigenous people. The Fort Nelson First Nation is a generic name for Interior Salish people belonging to the Ktunaxa and Snit First Nations. Interior Salish is a bit different from Coast Salish, the language of the people indigenous to where we now live. Both tribes have fished for and been sustained by salmon for thousands of years. The salmon were once abundant, but now exist in much smaller quantities.

Fort Nelson made the news yesterday for a different reason. The town is being evacuated because it is being threatened by wildfire. Although there are many fires burning in northern British Columbia that smoldered all winter and have begin to spread and grow in the warmer temperatures of this spring, this particular fire, which is covering about two and a half square miles, is a new blaze, ignited when high winds blew down power lines that sparked in tinder dry grass. The fire is rushing toward the community where about 3,500 people have been ordered to evacuate. In that remote region, evacuation forces people to travel hundreds of miles from their homes because developed communities are few and far between. Additional fires are threatening homes in Alberta. Smoke is a health hazard in British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan according to Environment Canada.

It is not yet the middle of May. People are bracing for what will be a long fire season. And in many places the fire season is a continuation of last year’s season which never came to an end. Warmer than usual temperatures combined with lower than average snowfall to result in a large number of fires that burned all winter long.

The smoke from wild fires has already resulted in poor air quality for much of Canada. Last summer’s fire season was particularly devastating in Canada. Over 37 million acres burned, eight firefighters were killed, and nearly a quarter of a million people were forced to evacuate from their homes. This summer could be much worse.

The combination of flames diffused by heavy smoke combined with a brilliant display of the Aurora Borealis to make some dramatic photographs. I am grateful, however, that even though I know the colors aren’t true to life, I can view the photographs instead of being an eye witness to the fires. For now, I feel fortunate to live is a somewhat safer location with the first a long way away.