Wine Storage

This past Saturday, I met up with one of the photography groups I am a member of; The San Diego dSLR Group.

Every month, we get together for a group shoot. It's a nice way not to only talk all things photography, but to also snap a few shots, for a few hours, have lunch, and share our shots from the day.

This month, our group shoot was held at the Bernardo Winery, located in the San Diego community of Rancho Bernardo, about 25 miles north of downtown San Diego.

The winery isn't all that big, at all. But, it is very intimate, with lots of odds and ends, crafts, a nice cafe, wine tasting tours (of course), and this wine storage area which has these century old huge containers (barrels) of wine. This is my favorite place to get photos at this winery.

This room has a very good mood. The lighting in here is excellent. The texture on these containers is awesome. Plus, the whole room wreaks pleasantly of fermented wine.

Pretty much, you are going to be photographing nothing but barrels, or containers, whichever you prefer, in this area. So the challenge is to find some interesting compositions to go with the spotty light.

For this shot, I liked the play between the little barrel with the huge container in the background. I did not manipulate the lighting at all.

This was also a good test of my new Carl Zeiss Distagon, 35mm, f1.4, ZE lens for canon mount cameras. This was shot at f1.4 and it is amazing how a lens this wide can blur the immediate background. The sharpness is also amazing at this focal length.

The one challenge is manually focusing the lens. The plane of focus is so razor thin. I think I am going to get another focusing screen to help me obtain precise focus much faster. I was using live view and the zoom buttons to ensure critical sharpness. That process is pretty tedious, to say the least. But, it is another great use of the live view feature on my camera.

Anyways, once I get the hang of this new lens, I think I am going to really love it.