17 August, 2019 8 comments Leave a comment

As my husband and I explored the island of Newfoundland earlier this spring and summer, often I felt compelled to use the 'panorama' function on my camera to record beautiful vistas. I found that standard 'landscape' format would not capture  the scope of many impressive views. This happened so often that I decided to present my best panoramic photos in this post to try to convey the vast beauty of ‘The Rock’.

The scene above is Western Brook Pond, the jewel of Gros Morne National Park on Newfoundland's west coast. The Long Range Mountains, the most northern section of the Appalachian Mountains, flank this freshwater fjord, which has 650 metre cliffs and is up to 165 metres deep. The Park covers 1805 square km and its natural beauty and unique geology earned Gros Morne UNESCO World Heritage status in 1987.

Below is Arches Provincial Park, just up the coast from Gros Morne. Three large holes have been eroded into the long rock formation by ocean waves. The beach, which stretches off in both directions, is composed of smooth round pebbles with fascinating markings. The people in this scene give a sense of scale to the rock formation.

The view from King's Point RV Park in the Baie Verte Peninsula (below) shows charming fishing stages in the harbour as well as the visiting iceberg. Our visit happened to coincide with capelin spawning season, so humpback whales were feeding on schools of tiny fish in the bay while we were there. We could hear the whales blow and occasionally see them surface throughout the day and evening.

We enjoyed hiking in the sunshine along the coastal trail at Sleepy Cove, near Twillingate on the north central coast of Newfoundland. In the scene below the bay on the right is part of Sea Breeze park, the site of a former copper mine, where you can camp for free and watch the sunset. I included the speedboat on the left to give life and scale to the vista.

While in the Twillingate area, we drove to Hillgrade to have dinner and enjoy musical entertainment at a seafood restaurant on the wharf. I took several photos of the gorgeous sunset that evening (shown below).

Near Embree on the north central coast, a light rain shower was approaching in the distance and created a misty perspective in the islands shown below. The scene reminds me of a watercolour painting.

When we explored Dungeon Provincial Park at Bonavista on the north east coast, the sun broke through the clouds to illuminate the rocky peninsula pictured  below. The shadowed background enhanced the dramatic lighting in this scene. The terrain of Newfoundland is predominantly rock, sometimes with a thin layer of stony soil on top that can support only stunted trees and shrubs. But some fantastic wild berries grow in Newfoundland and Labrador.

While most of the beaches we saw in Newfoundland were made of pebbles, gravel, or rock, there were some sandy shores. The one pictured below is Windmill Bight Beach in Lumsden on the northeast coast. Our weather was cool and windy so we didn't see any swimmers that day. 

Acting on a tip from the locals, we drove to see an outport on the Bonavista Peninsula near Clarenville. Southport, shown below, is a scenic hamlet and active fishing harbour in Trinity Bay. There were lots of paintable subjects there so I took many photos. The late afternoon light was lovely. We also saw beluga whales that day.

We spent a week exploring the Burin Peninsula on the south coast of Newfoundland. This is a beautiful region that has vast flat plains as well as hilly coastlines. The photo below shows one of the historic homes remaining in what once was a busy port when the fishing industry was booming.  

On the Avalon Peninsula on Newfoundland's southeast coast, we found many impressive coastal scenes. The one shown below is Bay de Verde, right out at the northern tip of the Bay Roberts peninsula. 

On the west side of the same peninsula, near the town of Whiteway, I took this photo below of Shag Rock. I love the serenity of this simple scene; I think it would make a great painting.

In photography, as in paintings, the way the light catches focal points in the landscape can make or break a scene. One day we were hiking the coastal trail at Cupids near Bay Roberts on the Avalon Peninsula and the sun shone through a gap in the clouds to illuminate this point on an island (below). This is the same kind of dramatic lighting I enjoy creating in my paintings. 

While touring the backroads of the Avalon Peninsula south of St. John's, we drove over a hill and way off in the distance I saw a series of headlands in the ocean. We stopped and I took a quick photo through the windshield of our truck. Afterwards I cropped the photo to emphasize the contrast between the sharply focused foreground trees and the misty background (below).

Many people have asked me which parts of Newfoundland were highlights for me. If I were to plot the locations of these panoramic vistas on a map, you would see that they represent most of the island. That is one remarkable feature of Newfoundland: its beauty is everywhere.

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