From a photography stand point the weather in Vancouver can be interesting. In the winter you can have months of low thick clouds that suck the interest out of the landscape. The light is flat and dark an you need to work really hard to find some thing interesting to shoot. In the winter ether get up high or think macro.
In the summer you have months on end of complete blue sky. If you are looking for a nice evenly lit well defused high cloud day you need to bring the scrims and fake it. The nice thing though is that near the end of the day you can get some high level clouds develop that can turn neon red at sunset. Sunsets in the Vancouver region can be dramatic to the point that if you posted them as they look in real life you would be accused of photoshopping them.
In between winter and summer the weather can be changing by the minute. Then there is the North Shore. The North Shore has it's own weather that is completely disconnected from the surrounding area. The North shore is a bit like the guy from the Peanuts cartoons that walks around with a cloud over him all the time. The North Shore often has torrential rain going on while the rest of Vancouver is applying the sun tan loation. The flip side is the North Shore has incredible views.
This video is a time laps of the crazy North Shore weather combined with the variability of the weather in late winter/early spring. It has a little bit of every thing. In the beginning it has clouds high and low moving left to right while the middle layer is moving right to left. You have blue sky, broken sky, down pour and even a rainbow. Enjoy.
Seymour Sunrise
This short time lapse is taken off the top of Mount Seymour. The part I find most interesting is the way that the light from the sun plays with the mid ground and fore ground as it rises. There was a wood pecker up there that found himself a nice perch on top of a metal light stand. When he started hammering on it you could hear it from over a kilometer away. It can't be stated enough what a luxury it is to be able to sleep in your own bed till 4AM, yet still be able to set up two tripods and cameras in time to shoot a mountain top sunrise. Eat your heart out Thomas Heaton.
Two of the greatest challenges of shooting time lapses at sunrise and sunset are the fact that the exposure is always changing and the color temperature is also changing. You start in the deep blue of night, swing into the amazing warm light of the sun rising or setting and then move back to the cool blue of daylight. Or reverse that for a sun set. From a dynamic range perspective you are going from the near perfect dark of night to the full on light of of day.
In a future article I will share some thoughts on how to deal with those challenges.