We're off the coast of Maine for our big summer photo trip this year.
It's an amazing place called Deer Isle, an actual island a couple of hours
north of Portland and home to the largest working lobster fleet in the state.
The miracle of Airbnb brought us to a magical cabin tucked into 4 acres
of woods on this island, about a mile from the coastal town of Stonington.
This area isn't all scrubbed clean and pretty for us tourists, although it's pretty enough
all the same. But driving state Highway 15 to the coast is a mix of
pretty New England architecture and hard scrabble fisherman housing,
lobster traps stacked in yards and old weathered lobster buoys littered about.
It's great to see we're in an area that's still hard at work.
Boats on their moorings in the Stonington harbor on Deer Isle.
This morning a big fog rolled in and I headed out to photograph. As anyone
that has followed my work knows, there's nothing I like better than a dense foggy
morning. This was one of those.
I started along the working harbor where the docks were almost empty, the
big lobster boats all out working, save for one. (A local had explained
to me yesterday that the lobsters had only recently 'arrived' off the coast
and the fishermen were all hard at it.) The little boats scatttered about
are the small dinghies the loberstermen use to mark their 'moorings,' their
anchorage locations that they rent from the town.
They bring their big boats in, unload their catch at one of the commercial docks,
then either head back out or anchor at their mooring spot, using the small boat to zip to shore.
From there I headed down the coastal road a bit to a beach access we had spotted
the day before. It was a beautiful cove just west of Stonington.
Here the fog was especially thick and with the tide out, huge granite
boulders revealed. Ragged pines and spruce rise up out of crags in these rocks, somehow
eeking out an existence here.
Seaweed left as the tide receded on the coast at Stonington harbor, Maine.
But the seaweed! Lucious in hues of yellows and browns,
the seaweed drew me like a moth to the flame. I photographed several specimens
from a variety of angles. One huge, flat piece--at least 12 incles wide and six feet long--
lay stranded on a boulder, waiting for the return of the water in about 6 hours.
I was reminded of the work of one of my favorite landscape photographers,
Michael Kenna. His foggy pine images from Asia have always been favorites
of mine.
I will never tire of this work. The quiet. The simplified, flattened and softened fog landscape.
The chance to work through the problem solving that all visual artistry involves--this
is what I live for as a photographer.
The intense blue of this small working dinghy really dazzled me in the subdued light,.