Hardiness

This was the last day of May, but the weather was still very cold. I was on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, Canada. For centuries, fishing was the main industry of this poverty-stricken province of Canada. However, about 30 years ago, a moratorium on cod fishing led to tens of thousands of unemployed people. Nowadays, the number of fishermen is a small fraction of what it used to be, and it is a tough job when regarding the average weather. It is when I saw these two fishermen and an iceberg that I thought about finding a shooting position to align them in a unique photograph. Since they were far from the shore, I needed my 500mm f/4. Furthermore, to reduce the perceived distance between the iceberg and the fishermen, I added my TC 1.4X for a total of 700mm. I also decided to frame the scene vertically to include enough water between me and the boat to better convey the fact that the fishermen were far from the shore. I took about fifteen photographs. In all of them except for two, the boat was not perpendicular to me, or the men were not making interesting fishing movements. In the remaining two photographs, I was lucky for one of them to have a seagull flying when I was making my photograph. This photograph, by combining fishermen, an iceberg, and a seagull, is IMHO the best photograph to represent the true nature of Newfoundland.