Friday, February 13, 2009

Robert Mondavi Vineyards - Summer 2008

This was a really tough experience for me. Blazing sunshine outside and dark wine cellars inside. I was very reluctant to use a flash in the cellars so that the natural colours would not be washed out. This is something I could have avoided if I had a dedicated iTTL Nikon flash, but instead all I had was the onboard pop-up flash. As a result there were some very important lessons learned, and many, many shots that were unusable.

This first shot was of some banners in the vineyard. I loved the contrast between the primary colours. I composed the image so that only the flags and the sky remained.


This second picture was an attempt to play with some depth of field. It was very difficult using a low f-stop to blur the background vines while maintaining a reasonable light level so that the details of the closest vines did not become super-saturated with light.

And finally we stepped into the cool, dark cellars to see the continuing wine-making process. There was a very warm feeling to the place despite the lack of light - something to do with the rich wood colours from the barrels. Using a low f-stop and cranking up the ISO allowed me to capture these rich colours, but the clarity of the pictures suffered and the resulting images were grainy.

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