Chasing the Run: Photographing Salmon on Vancouver Island

Every autumn, salmon return from the ocean to the rivers and streams where they were born. Salmon run every year, but the big sockeye runs come every four years, and 2026 was one of those years. Five of us spent a week on Vancouver Island in British Columbia to experience and photograph this incredible event.

We rented an Airbnb in Campbell River as our base for the week. A good friend who grew up on Vancouver Island served as our guide. He knows the island exceptionally well and took us to his favorite secret spots around the area. We also squeezed in three ocean dives during the week, but the salmon are the main focus of this article.

Fall on Vancouver Island can be rainy, but we didn't see a drop all week, and most days were filled with sunshine. We got to work in a wide variety of environments, from salmon pushing through rapidly moving water to large, deep pools full of schooling fish, and we saw several species, including chinook, pink, and sockeye.

While we had plenty of salmon to photograph, we were probably a little early this year. The sockeye were still silver, just beginning to show the red and green they're known for.

Below is what we learned, including two very different takes on remote triggering.

This wasn't "drive up to the dive site, gear up, and go diving." At most sites, we had to hike our gear (cameras, scuba equipment, weights, and everything else) a good distance up and down through wooded terrain. We were on existing trails, but it was still a haul in both directions.

That made reconnaissance essential. Before committing to the hike with a full load, we'd visit each site to scout it: were the salmon there, and what were the conditions like?

We started out thinking snorkeling would be the way to go. We eventually realized that in most cases, we needed to be on scuba, even in 4 feet (1.2 m) of water. Scuba let us lie still on the bottom and wait for the salmon to come to us.

With salmon, patience beats pursuit.

Water temperatures in the rivers and streams were around 56–57°F (13–14°C). We bought open-cell wetsuits specifically for this trip, and they worked perfectly. Anyone who knows Andy knows he gets cold easily, yet his 7mm open-cell wetsuit let him spend entire days snorkeling and diving without feeling the cold.

Lubing up to get into the wetsuit felt a bit strange at first, and getting out of it can be a chore. After a week of doing it every day, though, it became relatively simple, and Andy actually found getting into it easier than getting into a closed-cell neoprene suit.

Andy was really hoping to photograph bright red and green sockeye spawning in shallow streams. That didn't happen this time, but it just means he'll have to go back and try again.

Byron had the opposite goal. He didn't have much desire for the super-shallow-water shots that are pretty commonplace, since he'd seen those all over the Internet. He was hoping instead for true wide-angle shots showing salmon density, showing them in new environments, and showing healthy salmon in clear river conditions. That is for sure what we got, and he was pleased to come away with images that are a little different from what he'd seen before.

Remote triggering was the one topic where we went in completely different directions.

What I expected. I did a lot of planning before the trip trying to work out the best way to photograph the salmon. Based on my research, I had expected exceptionally shallow water, less than a foot (30 cm) deep, where I'd need to trigger the camera without spooking the fish.

Our early timing changed that picture. Only on the very last day did we see salmon in really shallow water. Most of the depths we worked in ranged from 3 to 30 feet (0.9 to 9 m).

The options. I read about, and talked to various people about, a long list of remote-triggering approaches: bike brake cables, specialized 3D-printed devices that slip over the housing's shutter lever, expensive advanced remote systems, Nikon's SnapBridge app, and more.

I shoot a Nikon D850, a DSLR, so triggering remotely via Live View doesn't work especially well, particularly when you're trying to capture peak-of-the-action moments.

What actually worked. The solution I tested at home, and that ultimately worked in the field, was simple: I took the line from my finger spool, taped it to the shutter lever on my housing with electrical tape, and tugged it to fire the shutter. I found I could stand near the edge of the river, 15 to 20 feet (4.5 to 6 m) away, and still reliably fire the shutter at will.

I also bought a tripod and weighted the camera down on the riverbed with ankle weights, since the currents were fairly strong. I couldn't see exactly what the camera was seeing, but I could see when schools of salmon were around it, and during those moments I fired the shutter repeatedly, hoping to catch something good.

After all that research, the winning remote was a piece of line and some electrical tape.

Camera settings. For my remote shots, rear-curtain sync combined with a slow shutter speed, around 1/13 or 1/10 sec, worked best. The slow shutter blurred out the unattractive parts of the background, including the masses of bubbles that come with photographing fish near waterfalls.

Rear-curtain sync matters because of how the fish move during that long exposure. With rear-curtain sync, the shutter opens, the ambient light records any motion as blur, and the strobe fires just before the shutter closes, freezing the fish at the end of its movement. The result is a sharp fish with a motion trail behind it, so it looks like it's swimming forward.

The default, front-curtain sync, does the opposite. The strobe fires as soon as the shutter opens, freezing the fish at the start of its movement, and the blur is recorded afterward. That puts the motion trail in front of the fish, making it look like it's swimming backward.

Byron, seeing my success, tried the same idea with his camera's built-in intervalometer, but it didn't give him the control he wanted.

My camera's intervalometer lets me put the camera on the bottom of a river and take photos at whatever interval I like, from one second to as long as I want, until the battery runs out. I'll concede that a remote shutter or an intervalometer gives good results in these shallow rivers with skittish subjects, but I found this type of photography a little boring and unemotional. Letting my camera take a whole bunch of photos that I wouldn't even see until later that night doesn't do it for me. I think photography is all about capturing the perfect split second, and getting that magic moment while looking through a viewfinder is what excites me most about underwater photography. For that reason, I soon abandoned remote shutters and went back to old-fashioned techniques.

Some of the rivers we used were a little cloudy, but they also had huge numbers of salmon in them. These salmon were definitely skittish, though, so it became a game of patience, either waiting for them to come super close or working as a team to corral salmon toward each other for close-up shots. In these conditions, Byron found that using the sun to enhance backgrounds made for nice shots. So did slow-shutter panning shots, which let some natural movement into the image.

It also helped to isolate an individual salmon. Byron thinks this is one of the reasons so many underwater photographers go in October: end-of-life salmon (often referred to as zombies) are a lot more docile and let you get super close.

For Byron, by far the best locations were the physically demanding ones. Fighting his way upstream in crystal-clear rivers and trying to get close to the salmon in the ripping current was exhilarating. The harder the work, the more he appreciated the images and the more connected he felt to them.

One river offered us a waterfall. It was a huge slog fighting our way up to it, but finally getting underneath it was pure magic: Byron was holding on for dear life in the current while salmon popped their heads through. He fired off some slow-shutter shots to try to capture the motion of the situation. It was a truly unique and difficult shooting experience, and it ultimately led to one of his favorite images of the trip.

On one day of diving, we also had incredible clarity and great sun. That let us shoot the more classic wide-angle imagery you normally see of salmon: lit subjects, Snell's window, and a fabulous bridge overhead that lined up perfectly in the window. This was not easy to shoot. Balancing the exposure took fast shutter speeds, closed-down apertures, low ISO, and super-high strobe power.

Just past the bridge was a large, deep pool. It was the best place we found for schooling salmon, which circled us like a tornado. These were sockeye just beginning their color change from silver to red, so getting strobe light on them to bring out that color was paramount.

The salmon here were calmer than elsewhere because of the deeper water, and the weaker current in the pool made them easier to reach. A freediver also joined us for this dive. Using her as a model let us get some great shots with more of a human connection.

In addition to shooting stills, our friends Andrew and Stacey mounted GoPros to lead weights and left them in strategic spots in the rivers and streams, and they came away with some really epic video sequences. The water was shallow and clear enough that ambient light alone brought out nice color in the salmon.

Here’s just a small sample of what they were able to capture

The salmon weren't the only highlight. On our ocean dives, we tried our luck at finding a giant Pacific octopus in open water. Some of those dives turned up many individuals, but almost all were in their dens and reluctant to come out in daylight. On one dive, though, Byron and his partner Lauren were alone underwater when she spotted the eye of an octopus peeking out of the kelp. She approached nice and calmly and extended her hand toward it. The octopus reciprocated by extending one arm, then came out of the algae into the open on the seabed. They spent a delightful 10 minutes photographing and interacting with him as he moved gently around. Byron estimates he was around 3 feet (0.9 m) across. He was a truly magnificent animal, and it was one of the best marine encounters Byron has ever had. Byron has shot a lot of octopuses, but usually with a macro lens, so shooting this one with a fisheye was just awesome.

Between a big sockeye year, a week of perfect weather, and our guide's local knowledge, Vancouver Island delivered. The two of us came at the salmon from opposite directions, one with a camera anchored to the riverbed and fired by a finger-spool line, the other behind the viewfinder in the current, and both approaches produced images we're proud of. For Byron, the dives in crystal-clear remote rivers with schooling salmon and waterfalls were among the best of his life.

The land wildlife really adds to the experience too: bears in the rivers with us hunting salmon, bald eagles flying overhead, and elk and other large animals along the roads as we drove around the island.

If you're planning your own trip, scout your sites, bring scuba gear, pack an open-cell suit, and be ready to hike for your shots. Vancouver Island is truly a diving paradise, with rich seas and healthy rivers, and we're both planning to return. Andy still has those bright red and green sockeye in shallow water on his list.