today at adelsheim, the consumer direct department hosted a futures event, in which consumers can taste wine from last year's harvest right out of the barrel. the owner (david adelsheim), winemaker (dave paige) and associate winemaker (erik kramer) were all there sharing their knowledge with the masses... and sarah king was there pouring in the most amazing red coat i've ever seen!
for this event, i rented a 50mm 1.4 lens and a flash. i have to say that, after friday evening, i kind of gave up on the lens. i didn't like it's extremely shallow depth of field (which frankly ended up making most of my photos show up out of focus... due to operator error, i know). i decided that, until i figure out exactly what type of photography i'd like to focus on, i'm sticking with the kit lens. i'm very partial to wide angle shots, so i'm thinking about going in that direction perhaps. i'm not really a portrait photographer, so i'm now not convinced that i need a portrait lens. at least i rented it first without just buying it outright!
but i digress...
back to today's event! (disclaimer: the image quality looks fairly poor on this blog posting, but they are much better on flickr)
since i am taking pictures of the futures event at adelsheim tomorrow, i wanted to test out some things today... namely the flash i rented for the weekend. chad offered to model for me, what a sport!
thankfully, i got a couple of decent shots of the space. hopefully i know what i'm doing tomorrow when there is more than one person milling around.
after we finished in the caves, we took fife out into the calkins lane vineyard next to the winery to get some energy out.
i'm sure all my friends in the midwest are going to laugh at this, but i had a pretty slow commute this morning after snow fell overnight last night. unlike the midwest, we do not have many snow plows, nor do they use salt here, so the roads (especially the country roads going to the winery) were very much covered in snow this morning and fairly slick. add to that a 700 foot decline down a mountain and i was very glad to have had anti-lock brakes this morning that worked!
the benefit of all of this was getting to the winery before anyone else and taking pristine photos without car tracks in the driveway or footprints in the snow. here is a selection for your viewing pleasure (these are unedited and i am still learning to meter for snow, so forgive me!):
if i tip my head in just the right direction, this is the view out of my office window. nice, huh?
i am really digging the desaturated vintage action i downloaded for photoshop. if i actually knew how to use photoshop, i probably wouldn't use it as much. however, i like how it came out here, and also in the rogue brewery photos in my last post.
what do you think?
on 17 june, i made a list of goals i wanted to accomplish before i turned 30. i figured since i only have 4 months to go, i might as well check in:
1) run the cascade lakes relay and the portland marathon (training in progress) i did the cascade lakes relay and had an awesome time! i'm actually signed up to do the hood to coast in august 2011 with my tnt girls. we are called the 'fit beaches.' hehe.
unfortunately, the portland marathon thing didn't work out because of IT band syndrome. i'm trying again for the eugene marathon on 1 may, but - honestly - i'm not feeling so confident. i had IT band problems again on saturday (the first time this season). i'm debating on whether i want to go through the whole physical therapy debacle again. it didn't work last time. i'm running again tomorrow (12 miles if all goes well), so i'll know more once that happens.
2) sell the house in nz; explore options for buying here in the valley we have the house back on the market as of the end of november, but not one person has looked at it. so frustrating! the market in cromwell is dead as a doornail right now and the realtors don't seem to have anything optimistic to say to us (that is, if they say anything at all - communication doesn't seem to be their strong point). we might just have to call this goal a wash for now.
3) start a 401k (i.e. finally be a responsible adult) - plus some other financial goals started the 401k, but then stopped contributing in january, as i am now working on my debt snowball. according to my schedule, i should have my two student loans paid off in 18 months!! how amazing will that be?
4) buy a nikon d90, keep reading photography books and blogs, and see if we can't create some acceptable images! i am extremely happy to say that, due to my amazing employer, this is underway! i got the camera last month and started photography classes this week! i'm SO, SO, SO excited!!!
5) go to nz for dane and julia's wedding and christmas with the douglas clan due to dave ramsey, i opted to forgo this trip. chad and i went solo for a few weeks -- i went to michigan for the holidays and he went to nz. it worked out very well, as i hadn't been back to michigan since the previous christmas.
6) book trip to chile and peru (even if the actual travel doesn't happen until after my 30th birthday) the plans for this trip are underway, although it has been edited to include peru and argentina! we have a whiteboard on our fridge that is tracking our savings goals and we should be on track to book flights in june for travel in november. we're tentatively going to peru to hike to machu picchu, followed by a couple of weeks in argentina -- mendoza, salta and buenos aires.
i guess - overall - this isn't so bad. goals 1 and 2 are kind of out of my hands, goals 3 and 5 got amended for bigger goals, and goals 4 and 6 are very much underway.
this morning, our winemaking team pressed frozen pinot noir grapes to begin the process of making a dessert wine we call deglace. these are grapes that we grew in our vineyards last year (harvested in october 2010) and they were sent to a commercial freezer until the winemaking team was ready to make the wine. once it's made, it needs to be bottled right away (i.e. this style of wine doesn't take too well to sitting in a tank), so they are preparing it for a bottling run we have scheduled in april.
if you click on the deglace link above, you can read about why we freeze the grapes and how the wine is made.
in the meantime, here are a few shots from this morning. it was a frosty, but very sunny and clear day!
66mm, f5.3, 1/3200 sec.
18mm, f/3.5, 1/40 sec
18mm, f/3.5, 1/6400 sec
18mm, f/3.5, 1/3200 sec
28mm, f/4.0, 1/30 sec
40mm, f/4.5, 1/15 sec
