In the last few years we have been making more of an effort to travel in Canada and in the States. We have been all over Europe, to Singapore and New Zealand multiple times but we have not spent a lot of time traveling in our own backyard.
This year, we decided to return to Newfoundland, Canada for a two week trip starting in the province's capital St. John's, then traveling up to Fogo Island which is on the northeast corner of the Island of Newfoundland and then finally a trip across to the west coast to visit Gros Morne National Park.
The Kit
At the beginning of this year I decided to take the plunge and move back to a Leica system as my main camera. I have an older Leica R film camera and a few nice lenses but because the system R cameras were discontinued, there was no easy upgrade path to digital. The Sony AR7 series was great because I could use my older Leica lenses which worked fairly well but I do a lot of travel photography and the R lenses are a bit bulky and on the heavy side. Leica has a few systems available these days but the choice was simple, I decided to go with the classic rangefinder, the Leica M11. It’s a very easy camera to use and “dose not get in the way” if that makes any sense. I had a funny conversation with a good friend of mine about making this switch. He was really pushing me towards Leica and I was like “So the Leica does not have video support, super fast auto-foucs, the ability to shoot a bazilliion frames a second and costs twice as much money - so why do I want this again?”. But that’s exactly the point, The M11 is not about any of the stuff that the Sony A7Rx does really well, it’s kind of the opposite. You manually set the ISO, shutter speed, set the aperture, manually focus the shot and then you push the release. Sounds like a lot but if you practice you can get most of it figured out before you even bring the camera up to your eye. Controlling the aperture means that you can work with the sweet spots of the lens - mind you, with Leica glass the whole aperture range is going to be very sharp but even so, I try to avoid going wide open or completely closed down unless I need to. In the end, you spend more time composing the shot and making sure you are going to capture it the way you want to do it and less time pushing the wrong buttons on a camera that is doing everything for you, focusing on the wrong spot, shooting too fast or too slow. Do I mess this up? Yes, absolutely. I have lost a few shots because the focus is out or I’m shooting wide open when I want more depth in the shot. It’s ok though, sometimes the mistakes are interesting in different ways that can be exposed in post production. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s just crap and sometimes the technically perfect (but compositionally boring) shots are crap too - this is how photography goes.
Ok, kit on this trip is the Leica M11, the Leica Super-Elmar-M 21mm f/3.4 ASPH and the Leica R Summicron 90mm f/2.0. I was hoping to bring a Leica APO-Summicron-M 75mm f/2 ASPH instead of the R lens but unfortunately it seems to be perpetually backordered (In the words of Wayne from Wayne’s world “Someday, you will be mine”). Also, because I’m using the R lens which blocks most of the view in the viewfinder and the 21mm SEM which captures a frame outside the bounds of the viewfinder, I also added the Visoflex 2 EVF. Cheating? technically yes. A ton of connivence, totally!
St. John’s
We fully expected the weather to be varied and St. John’s did not disappoint. With the rest of the country locked in a crazy heat wave, we were really hoping that we might find some relief with some cooler temperatures. What we got was the fog rolling in and then staying for the whole time we were in the city. While this sounds kind of dreary, for someone taking photographs its not the worst situation as the fog (and just generally being overcast) does tend to make the light a little less harsh. Unfortunately, fog does obscure the scene so maybe you are not going to get as much image as you really want. I just try to work with it. Sometimes it’s really cool effect while other times, you are standing on a cliff and you can hear the ocean, and you know it’s down there somewhere, but today is not the day.
The place we were staying at is in an area called The Battery which has great views of the harbour. In fact, we had the flagship for the Canadian Coast Guard docked right in front of our deck. The Louis S. St. Laurent is named after a former prime minister (Canada’s 12th prime minister from 1948 to 1957) and is a heavy icebreaker. It also is always on standby so it has a nice mechanical hum that runs all night long which alleviates the need for a white noise generator to help you sleep (if you are into that sort of thing, sadly, I’m not).
Maybe a bit hard to see (and also depends on the monitor you are using), but I used a “film filter” on the picture on the right which maps the film color profile for Kodachrome 64 onto the original image. In this case, you get a bit more colour in the sky but the main difference is going to be the red of the hull of the ship. Red is traditionally one of the harder colors to deal with and the Canadian Coast Guard red is definitely one of the more challenging shades of red. The Leica lens does a really nice job on this as it produces good contrast on the image and the film profile brightens the red without blowing it out. That last shot was taken on the first day we were in St. John’s at sunset, then the fog rolled in to stay for the rest of of our stay in the city.
Placentia
Since St. John’s was completely socked in, we decided to drive across to the other side of the the peninsula to Placentia
A few more shots from around St. John’s. The city, and the province, is well known for their colorful houses. I even noticed that all of the houses in the suburbs near the airport were a variety of colors.
Of course, no trip anywhere would be complete without checking out at least one brewery. We walked over to Quidi Vidi and had a nice lunch on their patio.
Fogo Island
The second stop on our trip was up to Fogo Island which is on the most north eastern corner of the province which is roughly a four hour drive plus a one hour ferry ride from St. Johns.
One interesting feature on Fogo is a number of artist studios that are scattered around the island. From their website “Fogo Island Arts’ international residency program provides opportunities for artists from a wide range of disciplines to live and work on Fogo Island for periods ranging from two to four months.”. All of the studios are remote, have very modern architectures and fantastic views.
Not necessarily unique to Fogo - there are lots of colorful fishing huts all over the island. Really not much processing on the image on the right, just added the film profile.