Just returned from a week long trip to Kennebunk, Maine to visit family. This was my second trip in as many years and it was another wonderful visit. My sister-in-law comes from a large Italian-American family and many members live in Kennebunk or surrounding towns. The area is beautiful in summer and a beehive of tourist activity. Pretty little towns with interesting local sights, shops, restaurants and pubs. And being July, all were decked out with American flags and bunting. Love a town which displays bunting!
In addition to exploring Kennebunk and Kennebunkport, we made a day trip north to Boothbay Harbor. Another pretty little town full of tourists and bunting. Boothbay Harbor boasts the longest footbridge in the country. It connects one side of the harbor to the other. We visited on a beautiful day with blue skies and white puffy clouds. Many lovely old homes and shops lining both sides of the roadways and harbor. To be sure there are a lot of shops selling touristy Maine stuff but there are also a few working shops selling to the fishermen / lobstermen fleets in the area. There is also a thriving marine boating scene with dock moorings as well as anchorages and the many types of businesses to support that specialized population.
We enjoyed lunch at a waterside pub overlooking the harbor. Interestingly, the service staff were all from Eastern Europe. Most were working for a company which supplies a steady stream of students who are out for the summer. A few had ended up staying in the U.S. and were splitting their time in the restaurant business between Florida and Maine. Wonderful, engaging young people who were happy to speak about their home countries. I'm presuming local employers are finding problems hiring locals to work and that is the reason for "outsourcing" to foreign nationals. Several years ago on a visit to West Yellowstone, Montana, I had a discussion with a shop owner who had issues finding good, local workers and who had engaged with a similar company to bring in Eastern European students to work the shops. While I haven't done a study of this issue, I suspect a reason may be that young locals are leaving these small towns for better opportunities elsewhere. These foreign national students fill the void.
For this trip I brought two cameras, one digital and one film. For the digital I brought three lenses, 25mm f/2.8 (Zeiss), 50mm f/1.5 (Voigtlander) and 90mm f/2.8 (Leica). Of those, the 25mm was most used followed by the 90mm. I'm finding that while walking in town, 25mm provides the wider angle context I desire in my images. Perhaps a bit too wide for landscapes and for those I tend to use the 50mm or the 90mm to shoot a series of three or four images then stitch them into a pano in Capture One. In Maine the 90mm was used for detail images and for a few landscape shots where I wanted to capture only a portion of the scene. As always I shot way more than necessary. The good news is that I am learning to cull quickly through images during the upload process. Anything remotely off about the image and I delete it. For the seven day visit I'll probably keep only 40-50 images, that's about 6-7 keepers per day of shooting. Perhaps still too many but I'm moving in the right direction.
The other camera was my 1983 Olympus XA-2. This camera figured in a recent post about a trip to London. In Maine it again performed very well and although this was mostly about digital I did manage to shoot one roll of Ilford HP5+ that was developed and scanned at home upon return. I am pleased that the old workhorse XA2 "point and shoot" continues to capture great images 40 years after I bought it. Well done Olympus!
This trip helped focus my thoughts regrading the two remaining big trips for this year - six days in Olympic National Park and seven days in Munich and Vienna. The Leica M10R with 25mm and 90mm seems to be a perfect setup for my style of photography. Wide angle best suites my sensibilities as it captures a large dose of context in each image. And, it gives me a lot of real estate for post processing. I find that most of my images are not level and the leveling process crops into the images. Additionally, I tend to crop in anyway to clean up framing. As 25mm is well outside the M10R viewfinder I'm not always sure, as I fire the shutter, what lurks at the edges of the frame. This was the same issue I had with 28mm as well. As a glasses wearer I couldn't see Leica's well lit 28mm frame lines. In fact, I could only just barely see the 35mm lines. As a result, cropping is a standard part of my workflow. Fortunately, the M10R's 40mp sensor allows a generous amount of cropping in and that is very helpful. All this to affirm my belief that 25mm will be a key go-to lens going forward.
In addition to the M10R, I plan to bring along the Leica M3 and a handful of Ilford HP5+. On that camera will live a 50mm f/1.5. While I don't use that focal length nearly as much, it is an incredibly sharp lens and the viewfinder of the M3 was designed with 50mm in mind. It is much easier for me to capture critical focus on the M3 given the 0.91x viewfinder versus the 0.72x on the M10R. Super convenient that the three lenses I'll have with me are interchangeable on the two camera bodies I'll bring.
A few of the images from Maine are below. It was a wonderful trip and I am looking forward to another visit next year.
The Colony Hotel in Kennebunkport. Olympus XA2 and Ilford HP5+.
This old soda pop fridge in Mike's American Diner caught my eye. Love the colors. Leica M10R and Zeiss 25mm f/2.8.
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