Hawaii

Maui, looking west to Lanai Island, May 2012.

SO MY OLD HIGH SCHOOL BUDDY MIKE CALLS ME UP OUT OF THE BLUE and asks if I'd like to go to Maui. Actually, I misheard him and thought he said "Mali" at first; that country was in the middle of a civil war at the time, and I thought this was awfully adventurous of Mike, but I was prepared to say yes anyway. It had been a long winter and I was desperate to go somewhere and do anything.

When Mike made it clear that he was talking about Hawaii, I was somewhat relieved and asked him for details. He'd won the trip as a prize at work for leading his team to some kind of record sales but his wife, a Montessori teacher, wasn't able to take off the time. I thanked him profusely for thinking of me and got the dates from him. I was going to Hawaii. Well, at least that means that Hawaii actually exists, I thought to myself.

Maui, May 2012.

For years I'd joked that I didn't think Hawaii was a real place. How could anywhere that sounded so much like paradise - perfect climate, middle of the Pacific Ocean - actually be real? Even when I met people from there, I kept the joke up and chastised them for leading people on about this implausible place. And now I was going.

Actually, I'm still not sure Hawaii exists, even after going there. The weather was, in fact, absolutely perfect, especially on the leeward sides of the island, which are drier than the wet, humid windward sides. In any case, a Canadian like myself gets confused by a place with growing seasons all year round, and where every plant - literally everything from lush shrubbery to the meanest little weed - produces some sort of outlandish, vivid blossom.

Flamingo, Hyatt Regency Resort, Maui, May 2012.

Mike's company put everyone up at the Hyatt Regency, one of a string of resorts on the leeward side of Maui. The Hyatt distinguishes itself by being home to an aviary; a collection of birds, including swans, penguins and flamingos, that live in the open air lobby areas and wander among the guests. Useful fact: Up close, flamingos don't look any more real than the pink plastic ones your tacky neighbour sticks all over their lawn.

The Hyatt is an excellent hotel, and I felt a little guilty when Mike set off every morning for some meeting or presentation or team-building exercise while I had the whole day to myself. I'd find a cabana or a lounger by the beach and settle in with a book. Or I'd take my camera - my Olympus E-620 with a single 25mm pancake lens on it - and go for a wander.

Hanakaoo Cemetery, Maui, May 2012.

A short stroll up the beach from the hotel led me to an old cemetery just a few yards inland, where the headstones matched the colour of the iron-rich volcanic soil. It seemed to be full of Japanese and Filipino labourers who'd died before the Pearl Harbor attack, and while more than a little bleak, seemed well-tended for a rough little patch of graveyard just a few yards inland from the ocean.

Maui, May 2012.

Mike signed us up for a hike and zipline adventure up in the hills above the resorts, where the exposed red soil would alternate with lush grass and trees covered in ochre and saffron coloured blooms. Our guides were typical of the sorts of off-islanders who ended up working there - surfer types who treated their job as a lark and probably smoked a fair amount of whatever they call Maui Wowie these days.

Silversword, Haleakala, Maui, May 2012.

With the end of the trip in sight and the daily corporate activities over, Mike and I rented a jeep and decided to drive up to the peak of Haleakala, the (apparently) dormant volcano that formed the island 750,000 years ago. The roads all over Maui were full of late model Mustangs - convertibles mostly, and the V-6 powered jobs that end up in rental fleets. We didn't get one of those, which was a good thing, because the road to the top of the volcano was quite steep in spots and the temperature dropped steeply as you headed up and through the clouds.

Up at the top we found a wholly alien landscape, with little vegetation except for plants like the silversword, which only grows near Haleakala's peak. The red soil and rocks made it all look decidedly Martian. We wandered around for as long as we could, which was a bit of a test for Mike who made the mistake of wearing shorts and sandals that day.

Haleakala volcano crater, Maui, May 2012.

It was an altogether pleasant break from what was becoming a sobering and apparently jobless life for me back home. In a couple of years my wife would give me the idea that became this blog. But the unlikely prospect of having a newsroom job again had finally struck home, and I was being forced to look at new options for whatever I jokingly called my "career" at that point.

I did come back from Maui with a vague intimation that I liked taking photos in strange new places. That this was something other people called "travel photography" hadn't quite occurred to me yet, but an idea had been planted. Now I just had to wait for somebody who wasn't a generous old friend to hand me another plane ticket and send me somewhere. For that, I'd have to wait a little bit longer.

Luton Hoo

Luton Hoo, Bedfordshire, UK, March 2008

I CAN THANK WALT DISNEY FOR THIS ONE. My second trip to England after over ten years was a press junket organized by Disney to push the DVD release of Enchanted and National Treasure: Book of Secrets. This was, as far as I can tell, the last great golden moment for movie  press junkets, which I'd been doing regularly for at least a couple of years at the free daily, though mostly to either New York or Los Angeles.

I don't know how or why they chose this lovely 18th century manor house, designed by Robert Adam (with later additions) and landscaping by Capability Brown. It was being turned into a golf and spa resort and I think our group was part of the soft opening before they officially began taking guests. I suppose it fit the theme of Enchanted - sort of - though the connection to the latest Nicholas Cage film was tenuous. I wasn't complaining, in any case.

Luton Hoo, Bedfordshire, UK, March 2008

We were a large group of English-speaking international press, and within a day or so we'd sorted ourselves into little cliques. I ended up in a group of colonials - Canadians and Australians, who seemed to appreciate each other's sense of humour more than anything else. The unofficial ringleader was Sam de Brito, an Australian who ended up writing a column about our little group. I was shocked to learn, from another Australian while on a travel junket two years ago, that Sam had died.

Our lodgings were, in a word, palatial. Sir Julius Wernher, who bought the house in 1903, had it redesigned by the architects of the Ritz, his favorite London hotel. My own room was in a new addition built for the new hotel, and was larger than my first two apartments put together. I had my first Full English breakfast at the hotel, which was a revelation, though I'm grateful it isn't a regular menu item here.

Luton Hoo Resort, Bedfordshire, UK, March 2008

I don't remember much about the junket - there was an etiquette lesson, and a ride in a car driven down an obstacle course by a stunt driver. The real star of the trip was the house and the grounds, which gave me my first glimpse of the English Country House up close. I could have - and should have - spent hours wandering around; I'm amazed that I didn't follow that long lawn down to the view that Capability Brown obviously wanted me to take in, but I was still unsure about shooting landscapes back then.

So I stuck close to the house and shot the ancient trees, the gazebo and its ceiling, and the ornaments and statuary placed around the gardens. It was my first glimpse of a really first class lodging, and I can say with authority after a few years of doing travel journalism that there are few things that give more pleasure than a really nice hotel - at least for me.

Luton Hoo, Bedfordshire, UK, March 2008

Spain, again

The Alhambra, Granada, Spain, 2007

I FINALLY GOT BACK TO SPAIN IN 2007, ON ASSIGNMENT FOR THE FREE DAILY. We had grown an active travel section in addition to all the other trappings of a real newspaper, and got offered a junket by Air Transat to the south of Spain. They asked me if I'd be interested in going. What a silly question.

The trip went straight through the tourist heart of spain - Seville, Granada, Jerez and the Costa del Sol, hitting almost every blue book destination on the way. It was a part of Spain I'd never seen before - all my time there had been spent in Barcelona and the mountainous north - so I was curious what I'd think about the Spain of holiday lets and package tours.

The Alhambra, Granada, Spain, 2007

I will admit to being a bit overwhelmed by The Alhambra. I took plenty of wide shots of the rooms and courtyards, but they were either not quite "there" or ruined by being peopled with other tourists. In any case I had plan B at hand, and spent a lot of time shooting details. There were a lot of details - every wall and door and window frame was loaded with ornament, not to mention the bits of monumental architecture added by later Spanish monarchs.

Leica D-Lux 3

This was my first time traveling with a digital camera, which relieved me of the stress of worrying about running out of film. I went to Spain with the paper's Canon DSLR as well as a bit of review tech - a Leica point-and-shoot (which was really just a re-badged Panasonic with some Leica software tweaks inside.) The intriguing thing about the D-Lux 3 was that it had an extra wide LCD screen at the back to accommodate its panoramic mode. It also came fully charged, but without a DC charger, so I had to be sparing with it for the whole trip, finally eking out the last bits of power till halfway through the last day.

Bull in olive grove, Gerena, Spain, 2007

Bullring, Granada, Spain, 2007

You'd think that I'd have shot a lot of panoramas with the Leica, but for some reason I ended up composing with it vertically most of the time, probably just because landscape shots seemed so ordinary. We went for a tour of a corrida bull ranch/olive orchard, which is where I saw the big fella above, silhouetted against the late afternoon sky. It seemed like a nice bookend to the shots I took on a quick visit to the bullring in Granada, which was unfortunately empty the day we were there.

The Alcazar, Granada, Spain, 2007

Estepona, Spain, 2007

Unlike my first travel junket to Spain, or my visit to Peru, I knew that my photos from this trip would land somewhere in the paper, so I did my best to shoot something like conventional travel photos. It was a lot harder than I expected, and I ended up with lots of images like these - pretty pictures of things I saw that edged a bit too close to the abstract to be regular travel shots.

Jerez, Spain, 2007

Francisco Nuñez de Prado, Baena, Spain, 2007

I got closest to that elusive goal when I could fit people into my shots, like our stop in Jerez for the Feria - the big annual summer fair and equestrian celebration - and the Real Escuela Andaluza del Arte Ecuestre, the royal riding school. The Feria was a lot of fun - as much a celebration for locals as a tourist event, and a bit of an outing for the local gentry to show off. I was flattered when our local guide - a pretty young woman from Spanish tourism - told me that she wasn't so sure about the rest of the group, but she could see me fitting in there quite happily.

The highlight of the trip for me was in Baena, where we visited the Nunez de Prado olive oil factory and met Francisco Nunez de Prado, whose family had run the business for generations. In the lovely old whitewashed buildings with his impeccable English and tailored blazer, he looked like the sort of man I would love to be in another life, seemingly content with the lucky accident of his birth. I could think of worse things to do than make olive oil for a living.

Cordoba Mosque and Cathedral, Spain, 2007

Jerez, Spain, 2007

Seville, Spain, 2007

I was under no compunction, personal or otherwise, to avoid the picturesque during the trip, so I let myself go nuts with the sights, from the Cordoba Mosque to the plazas in Seville to the ceilings of various and sundry cathedrals. I still have to remind myself to go for the picturesque full bore when I do travel photography, in an effort to override my instinct to shoot the odd, stark and abstract. Looking over these shots I can see myself wrestling manfully with this inclination.

Malaga, Spain, 2007

Another highlight of the trip was in Malaga, where I saw my first full-scale Roman ruin. I had seen bits and pieces of classical Rome before, mostly in Barcelona, where the stubs of Roman walls could be seen, their stones built upon with subsequent layers, all of which were centuries older than anything I could see at home. But the full reveal of a Roman amphitheatre in the midday sun, as many times as I might have seen pictures of such a thing, really took my breath away when I finally saw it for real.

Finally there was this window in Seville, glimpsed somewhere near the Jewish ghetto, that caught my eye - the sort of thing my camera is constantly being drawn towards. I have good memories of this trip, but a lingering sense that I was still on a steep learning curve with travel photography. I would, eventually, get a bit more practice, but it would take almost a decade to get the opportunity.

Window, Seville, Spain, 2007

The End of Film

Topham Pond, Toronto, June 2018

I BOUGHT MY LAST REAL FILM CAMERA IN 2003. I've bought cameras since then - antiques and curiosities and some Lomography stuff, but they were either used as toys or meant to sit on a bookshelf in my office. The last new film camera I really used was the Canon EOS Elan 7e I purchased in 2003, after my trusty Canon EOS Elan (known in most markets around the world as the EOS 100) stopped working after a solid decade of hard use.

I knew when I bought it that the 7e would be my last film camera. Digital was happening in a big way, but the technology was still pretty hit-and-miss and the camera manufacturers hadn't come up with a single image file as the industry standard. I thought that I'd be using the 7e for at least three or four years when I packed it for my press junket to Peru - the camera's big shake-out cruise.

It's a pretty great piece of gear. Built out of alloys and polycarbonates like most of Canon's lower-priced cameras, it was on the top edge of their prosumer SLR line and included some pretty incredible technology, like an eye-following autofocus that worked really well, though it's never reappeared on any of Canon's subsequent cameras, amateur or professional. It was light and took all my old lenses and by the time I was back from Peru it seemed like we were ready to go.

I rarely ever used it again. The camera companies finally agreed on a common image standard - jpegs for compressed images and RAW files for uncompressed. With that settled, they could really begin competing with each other in the marketplace, which saw prices for cameras start to drop. In 2004 the free daily put me back to work shooting and bought a Canon digital SLR for me to use. The 7e was packed away in a camera bag and I don't think I put another roll of film through it again until last week.

Topham Pond, Toronto, June 2018

Knowing that I was going to be writing a blog post about the end of film photography, I pulled the 7e out of its bag in the basement, put some fresh batteries in the grip and loaded it with an expired roll of Ilford Delta 400 film I'd had sitting around since the camera was new. It only took a minute to decide that the most suitable subject on a warm June day was in my old neighbourhood, just a couple of blocks away from where Kodak Canada's plant used to be - the factory where women in my family worked since the '20s.

The pond on the southeast corner of the Eglinton Flats wasn't called Topham Pond when I was a kid. I don't recall it having a name (though I distinctly remember its stagnant odour in the heat of summer), and the parkland surrounding it was mostly grass and scrub with a few stands of shrubs and a single copse of trees at the bottom of the hill where teenagers went to smoke and make out. It's been landscaped and naturalized since I moved away over thirty years ago, and has become one of the nicest green spaces in the city, as far as I'm concerned.

Topham Pond, Toronto, June 2018

To compare and contrast, I also brought along my current favorite camera - the Fuji X-30 that has been a big part of the revival of my enthusiasm for shooting. There's no denying that the two cameras make me shoot differently, and that the images that come out of them have distinct qualities. Even if I didn't have to push the Ilford a stop to compensate for the lack of sensitivity of expired film, the grain in the film is hard to ignore, and has to be worked with when processing up the final images in Photoshop.

The digital files are very different - smooth and full of resolution when working from RAW files, and far easier to manipulate in editing. The film shots look like lithographs, full of rough analog texture, while the digital photos have a fine, long tonal curve that feels more like graphic art. It's easier to push and shape the digital files into something less realistic, and since the move to digital I've been able to realize effects that I could only imagine in the darkroom.

But the 7e wasn't my only final film camera. A year before I bought it, I walked into the one hour photo lab by the basement food court in the mall next to the free daily's offices and picked up an Olympus Stylus Epic on impulse. With my first steady paycheque in almost fifteen years, I was feeling flush, and I wanted a little camera I could fit in a pocket.

Until the Stylus, most point-and-shoot cameras were pretty dismal, but Olympus had produced a really useful bit of kit that, thanks to its bright, wide lens and an unusually accurate exposure system, had become a hit with professionals who used it to take notes, or even as a backup camera. It was the first small, inexpensive camera that I felt I could trust the way I've since learned to trust almost any recent digital camera - or the cameras in my smartphones, which have effectively killed off the point-and-shoot market.

Lunenberg wharves, Nova Scotia, Summer 2002

Barrington Street looking north from Sackville, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Summer 2002

Fog at Harbourville, Nova Scotia, Summer 2002

The Stylus was as indispensable then as my X-30 is today. I packed it with a Holga plastic camera on the Peru trip, and I actually have to look close to tell the difference between shots taken with the Stylus and the 7e. It was most useful of all on the summer trips we took to visit my wife's family in Nova Scotia, both before and after we had kids. I could use it for family snaps and for artier shots, like a short series I took holding up some of the vintage postcards I was collecting in the spots where they were taken.

If I'm honest, I don't miss film. I never really enjoyed the smell, the cost or the inconvenience of the darkroom, and I don't care if I ever develop another roll of film again. Image editors like Photoshop offer a complexity and ease of manipulation that has the added advantage of working anywhere - preferably in a comfortable chair by a window. But I feel bad that the 7e will never get used as much as its predecessor, and not just because it feels like I never got my money's worth out of its purchase price.