This article shares a selection of photographs from our Western Brook Pond Boat Tour experience during our visit to Newfoundland earlier this year. Since we went quite early in the season, Bontours offered only one sailing per day at 12:30 PM.

To get to the boat dock one must hike in 3 kilometers from the parking lot. We made the trek under fairly heavy rain. Then we waited for a couple of hours for the captain to decide if the weather was good enough for the tour to operate that day.

Unfortunately the fog was far too thick and our boat tour was cancelled.. Our payments were refunded online.. and we had another wet hike back out to the parking lot. A few days later we were able to rebook and participate in the boat tour.

During the tourist season it is advisable to book early as the boat tours can fill up quickly. I don’t think that Bontours accepts any ‘walk-ins’ for the Western Brook Pond Boat Tours.

I’d like to thank one of our readers, Ray Miller, for allowing us to use one of his photographs from his experience with the Western Brook Pond Boat Tour. Once on the boat tour it can be difficult to find elements to incorporate in images that help establish a sense of scale as demonstrated in Ray’s photograph above.

As we waited for the boarding call, I spent some time composing a number of different images of the tour boats with some of the mountains and cliffs in the background.

I was very glad I had the foresight to bring some photographers’ gloves with me as the weather was ‘crisp’ for the end of May. The daytime high was 2 Celsius accompanied by very strong winds.. and even a few snow flurries.

Once we pulled away from the dock I headed upstairs to the uncovered observation deck as it afforded me the best chance for some unobstructed views of the rugged scenery. One composition approach that I used was to include a portion of the vessel to add context to some of my photographs.

I don’t typically include any people that I do not personally know in my travel photography images. In this case I did compose a few images with some tourists in them as they helped provide a sense of scale.

As the tour boat entered the gorge we were greeted by some rugged and dramatic terrain. The snow and ice added a different feel to the photographs.

On the day of our tour the fog tended to be a bit thicker as we ventured further into the gorge. This climatic condition caused some loss of visual detail with more distant cliffs, and helped create a feeling of increased distance in a number of photographs.

It was important to use a zoom lens that provided a wide range of focal length options (i.e. M.Zuiko PRO 12-100 f/4 IS). This enabled me to capture a variety of details with the rock structures, as illustrated in the following images.

 

The Western Brook Pond Boat Tour provided some interesting perspectives of the natural geography of the area.

On a couple of occasions we were encouraged to ‘see’ a rock face in the slide of the cliffs… or a silhouette of a head as illustrated in the image below.

I found that I spent some of my time looking into the distance, or reviewing portions of the gorge through which we had already passed.

These views tended to provide the the best compositions of visually overlapping elements.

My eye was also drawn to repeating patterns in the rock, as well as colour bands created by the snow, ice and rock.

As regular readers will know, I often see compositions as a collection of geometric shapes… like the triangles in the image above.

The  final two images in this article are of the far end of Western Brook Pond just before the boat turned around for its return to the dock.

When you compare these two compositions you’ll be able to clearly see how using a wider focal length and incorporating a foreground element significantly changed the feeling of the resulting photographs.

My wife and I enjoyed the Western Brook Pond Boat Tour. The weather wasn’t ideal, but since none of us can control the weather, the objective is always to try to do the best we can with the photographic opportunities afforded to us by Mother Nature.

 Technical Note

Photographs were captured handheld using camera gear as noted in the EXIF data.  Images were produced from RAW files using my standard process. This is the 1,293 article published on this website since its original inception in 2015.

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