USA Today Article Featuring Photography at Wrath Winery

A few weeks ago I shot a number of photos at Wrath Wineries in the Santa Lucia Highlands, about 45 minutes inland from Carmel and Monterey. I am happy to report that one of the images, the twilight exterior, has been featured in a USA Today article detailing all the amazing wineries in this area. Pretty excited with the headline coverage, here, to be sure! You can read the entire article and see the image here (or by clicking on the article below). I've also linked back to a blog post detailing how I made the image, which can be read by clicking here.

Mpkelley.com architectural photography published in USA Today

Architectural Photography: Photographing Wrath Winery in Soledad, CA

Seems that these days a larger and larger percentage of my photography is taking place outside of Los Angeles, and I'm totally loving all of the new locations I'm getting to see on my travels. In addition to the Hahn Winery (seen in the below post) which I photographed, I also shot the Wrath Winery, also located in Soledad, CA, for a revamp of their marketing materials. Wrath is situated in the gorgeous Salinas valley, which makes for some very interesting lighting and fog effects at sunset. As the cool air from the Monterey Bay moves inland, it meets the warm air from the eastern side of the valley and condenses, creating a fog which rolls rapidly up the valley towards the vineyards we were in. While this caused me a bit of trouble while photographing Hahn, it made for a beautiful twilight down in the valley at Wrath. The clouds added great atmospherics and really let me play up the name of the winery - I felt like I could really push it with the processing on this, given the name, location, and lighting effects. 

This was lit with a combination of strobe and hot light - actually, scratch that - warm light - a Lowel GL-1, which doesn't really get hot like a traditional hot light, and is thus ten times easier to use for my style of photography. I've got the burn marks on my hands from regular hot lights to prove it. In addition to the GL-1, we had a series of PocketWizards set up in relay mode to help cover the enourmous distance between myself and the building. Due to the pond in front of me eating the radio signal, it took two or three PocketWizards to make it over there, but we finally got the system working flawlessly.

The interiors of the tasting room, which is located in downtown Carmel, were lit entirely with the Lowel GL-1 - I am beginning to love this light more and more everytime I use it, as it has replaced speedlights and inkies in a number of applications for me. I kept the GL-1 bare with no gel in an effort to bring out some of the richness and color in the natural wood interior. I just love the warm quality of light that we created throughout.

It took about 2.5 hours to create the three interior photographs - which was made tricky as a result of the tasting room being open for business, even though it was about 11am on a Monday. Thankfully, everyone was wonderfully accomodating and we even had a few people stop by to spectate and observe what was going on. Seems Carmel attracts a fair amount of hobbyist photographers who were keen to see the shoot in action.

All in all, this was one of my favorite shoots in recent memory. It's not often you get to set up a tripod in vineyards, enjoy an amazing sunset, taste plenty of great wine, and come home with four portfolio-quality photographs. Jobs like this are a reminder of why I love what I do!

Architectural Photography: Light Painting A Winery From a Half-Mile Away

I once again loaded up the car and headed away from Los Angeles to the Salinas Valley to photograph the Hahn and Wrath Wineries, both of which are located around an hour from Carmel in an amazing setting. Shooting these wineries presented a number of challenges, and I'm going to talk a little bit about how I overcame them. I know I've been on a bit of a hiatus lately, but hopefully this post makes up for it. 

First, let's talk about the shoot I did for Hahn Wineries in Soledad, CA. The client had a few ideas for shots that they knew they wanted, and they more or less left the rest up to me. I was given a tour of the grounds, and immediately settled on a few shots, and scratched my head over a few more. They had mentioned that they wanted a few great shots of their tasting room, which is one of their big attractions for visiting customers. The problem was that the tasting room is elevated about 20 feet off the ground on a steeply sloped hillside, and was entirely surrounded by trees on the high side. Any hopes of me creating an architecturally interesting photograph from the ground were quickly dashed, and my options seemed to be severely limited to either renting a helicopter (expensive) or using some extremely tall and unstable pole to shoot from the slanted ground below (a bad idea, and generally unsafe). 

While walking around and talking to the client, they pointed out a ridgeline on the other side of the valley where they often took customers on the tour to see the entire layout of the winery and its vineyards. I was initially reluctant to try to shoot from this vantage point, as the small size of the tasting room would require some serious telephoto reach and would eliminate nearly all of the architectural appeal of the building. On a whim, I asked if we could take a ride up to the ridgeline to see if we could gather any other shots, and it turned out to be a pretty great vantage point from which to shoot the tasting room. 

While I didn't end up zooming in that far (we ended up shooting at 50mm) the shot actually looked like it might work. While you lose some of the architectural details of the tasting room, you do get an incredible view of the grounds and the sense of scale becomes immediately evident. I made a decision to make the twilight shot more about the entire winery rather than just the tasting room, which I will admit was a little daring on my behalf. 

After choosing where to take the photo from, it was just a matter of playing the waiting game until sunset. Once dark enough, I had my assistant Jaron  head back to the tasting room armed with a big light and a walkie talkie.

Because of the distance involved and the fact that I was standing on the side of a valley, we weren't able to use PocketWizards to light the scene as I usually would. This was simply too far, and I didn't want to try to wrangle multiple PocketWizards in relay mode from my position, down to the valley floor, up the other side of the valley, and again to the tasting room. Too much time and effort for something that franky just didn't seem like it would work. So we tried another untested method - I would talk to Jaron on the walkie talkie, count backwards from three, and open the shutter for a long exposure. He would (ideally) then pop the flash manually while the shutter was open for the 3 or so seconds I'd set it to, and the sensor would record the flash pop. Here's one of the frames that was composited so you can see what I'm talking about:

I'm happy to say that we were somewhat succesful. For this exterior view, we delivered two shots - one with light trails, and one without. I wanted to give a sense that you might be able to take a sunset winery tour in the ATVs provided by the facility, and even though the client didn't request it, I thought it was a cool add-on with minimal work involved, so I threw it in anyway.

So, all that effort - do you think it was worth it? It's certainly a unique shot, the likes of which I don't have in my portfolio and it was something I don't think I'll be trying often. Another challenge for me was dealing with the fog that rolls into the valley and the haze that forms as a result. I'm not sure if it gives this photo a bit of mood and a sense of place, or if it just distracts. 

Below are a few more images from the job - my personal favorite is the image of the tasting room, shot with a Lowel GL-1 hotlight in complete darkness.