Dyer’s Bay

We drove down the narrow hillside road to Dyer’s Bay, on the Bruce Peninsula, Lake Huron, after the sun had set. The light on the water was exquisite, pink and lilac, a soft silky sheen rippling like cloth upon the surface. There was no time to set up a tripod - I had to work fast, find the right angles and perspectives, compose and shoot hand-held before the light was gone.

Only as I wrapped up the shoot did the reality sink in. Those lovely skies, those skeins of colour cast upon the surface of the lake, came not from the setting sun but from smoke from the wildfires consuming vast tracts of Ontario and Quebec. These photographs, then, are not innocent. The beauty you see is the terrible beauty of the future we are creating, through climate change and our failure to take action.