I got my camera back from the shop on Friday and thought taking a bunch of pictures on Saturday would give my camera a good test run and give me a chance to see how the repairs went. First thing to note, REMEMBER to double check your camera settings when you get it back from the shop. I guess I take it for granted that my camera is always set how I want it and I don't need to recheck anything except the ISO and exposure settings when I am taking pictures. I manually meter everything so those are the only two features I care about regularly. Well my camera was completely reset and I didn't realize it so all my pictures were taken in JPG yesterday. Nothing too dramatic, but gave me a chance to see how my exposure work when I don't have the leeway of RAW formatting. Also I took a couple of under exposed shots so I could bump up my shutter speed, knowing I could fix it in Lightroom and in RAW. So definitely some learning experiences on this trip. Its harder to fix an underexposed JPG than RAW file.
We started off the trip on a train ride from Burbank to Santa Barbara. I played around with my exposure in the train to see what I could get with the back lit subjects and the indoor setting using all natural light. Here is a picture of my sister-in-law that I got working in that environment.
Then we got off the train, and that is a good opportunity for a group picture. I risked it and only took one frame of the group shot because I think everyone was looking. Probably won't do that again, but we were in a hurry so I made a sacrifice. My brother and I are missing from this photo, but it is all of Annie and her friends.
The last of the people pictures I wanted to share is a portrait of my brother and his wife. It is fun to see how I have evolved as a photographer. About 4.5 years ago we were at this exact same winery and I took a picture of them in the exact same spot. Here is the side-by-side comparisons. When I took the original I was just starting to think in portraits and portrait photography.
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| March, 2006 |
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| October, 2010 |
The rest of the pictures of people were more for Annie than for my portfolio so I won't share those, but I did take some detail shots to test out some new shooting techniques and just have some fun. This first image is in the wine cave or the cellar at Gainey.
It is still crush season because it has been a really cool year and the wineries can't harvest the grapes until the weather is very warm. It was raining all last week as an example. So the vines were still full of grapes. I have never seen netting on the grapes before, but this is what it looked like at Roblar. I am assuming they put on the netting because the grapes are right next to the parking and they don't want people sampling.
Then I wanted to see what it would look like photographing wine glasses. These are such reflective surfaces it really is hard to get a good photograph with the light bouncing all over the place and me being unable to control that light. I decided to take some pictures of "the pour" in a shallow depth of field just to experiment.
Cheers to a fun day of wine tasting, lots of fun picture taking opportunities and lots of good wine.
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