Morning light and clouds at Pounding Mill Overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway MP 413
Kathy & I had a last-minute chance to take off to the mountains this past weekend and meet up with some friends. There are definitely signs of color in some spots, primarily the higher elevations. We didn’t spend a lot of time photographing, preferring instead to explore the towns of Waynesville and Sylva. I did manage to crawl out of bed early on Saturday for an attempt at sunrise, but we left with no evidence that the sun had risen other than the fact that the sky got lighter. We did end up seeing some sun later in the day and on Sunday, but for the most part things were on the cloudy and foggy side.
Like many weekends in the mountains, this was one of widely variable conditions. We found sun in some spots, were totally socked in with fog in some spots. We discovered fall color in some places, while in others summer was still holding on tight. We stopped by a waterfall along one of the side roads and in 15-20 minutes didn’t see a car, while earlier on the Parkway traffic was starting to get busy.
Waterfall on West Fork Pigeon River, Route 215 Lake Logan Road, Pisgah National Forest
I’m still struggling to find my photographic “groove” and I didn’t help myself much this weekend. I guess I’ve just allowed myself to get out of practice. It has been a crazy year so I have a good excuse, but it’s frustrating to feel so out of it, creatively. I’m back on the upswing though, and am confident that I’ll get things back on track over the next month or so.
All in all we had a great weekend. Good food and good times with friends are tough to top!
City lights of Hendersonville, NC shine through the pre-dawn fog from Pounding Mill Overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway MP 413.
***
I love the Blue Ridge Parkway, and it is one of my favorite places to visit any time of the year, especially in the fall. But more and more I find myself struggling with the sheer number of people that head for the Parkway when the leaves start to peak. In particular I’m bothered by what appears – to me at least – to be an increase in the irresponsible behavior and lack of respect that some drivers have. This past weekend I witnessed a number of “bad apple” drivers, in particular motorcycle riders, doing stupid and reckless stunts. Passing on curves and in no-passing zones, tailgating and intimidating drivers who weren’t going fast enough to suit them. It really takes away from the peaceful experience that I have always gone to the Parkway for. I understand that not everyone goes to the Parkway for peace and quiet, but when the antics of a few people manage to wreck the experience it is hard to tolerate.
I had already made plans to experience fall in other places this year, but after this past weekend and some similar experiences last year, I think I’m going to wait until I have time to plan my visits in mid-week to hopefully avoid most of the crazies. I realize that most drivers and riders are careful and responsible, and that for the most part their biggest offense is making a lot of noise, but I think I’ll wait and head back in November and December, when only the most hardy adventurers are willing to brave the elements.
Morning light and fall color at Pounding Mill Overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway MP 413
Fall happens everywhere, and I think my goal for this year will be to find Fall in some of the less-discovered places! We’ve got some interesting adventures coming up, so stop by again soon to see what we’ve been up to.
Morning light and fog at Pounding Mill Overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway MP 413
When I was growing up I had an aunt, or a cousin or some relative who had the seats in her car covered with plastic. I always thought that was a little strange, to take this nice comfortable fabric and cover it with hot, sticky plastic, just so it wouldn’t get dirty or wear out. I don’t remember for certain, but I think she might have had the furniture in her house covered in plastic too. People used to – probably still do – use plastic carpet runners to keep people from walking on the carpet. I’ll admit that I can see the logic in covering carpet with carpet runner, in the winter, when it used to snow, and we people would come in the house with snow on their boots. But in the middle of summer? Nah!
Too Lazy for Sunrise
Today, we can’t buy a cell phone without being offered a “screen protector.” I don’t understand why I would buy a fancy new phone with a gorgeous display and stick a piece of foggy plastic on it. So it won’t get dirty? It’s a touch screen, for Pete’s sake! It’s going to get finger marks on it! When I bought my last laptop, one of my students was appalled that I hadn’t paid another $50 or more for some rubberized piece of goo to cover the computer. I said, “someone went to a lot of trouble to make this computer look so nice, why would I want to cover it up?” We get sold $10 UV filters to put in front of our camera lenses, we can buy “skins” to cover up our cameras and lenses, but for what? So it won’t look like we use them? Come on, we don’t use them enough as it is, why cover it up with some aftermarket stuff someone thinks we need, just to keep our gear looking nice.
I have no idea why that was stuck in my head today. Well actually I do, and I feel much better now. Thanks!
I’ve been away for a while. I didn’t go far, but things are finally settling down after a difficult and hectic August. Kathy has gotten her Dad’s affairs pretty much in order, and to the extent that I’ve been able to help I have helped. Work demands have taken some of my attention too, so there just hasn’t been a lot of time for writing and creativity. The blog got pushed to the side for a little while, but here I am.
Sunrise on the Beach, Hilton Head Island, SC
Kathy & I spent Labor Day week at the beach. Besides all the hoopla that was already playing out in Charlotte (the DNC, for those who pay even less attention than me) it was time for a break. Kathy was just about wrung out and so was I, so it was perfect timing. A trip to the beach was definitely in order.
Our “beach of choice” is Hilton Head Island, SC. We’ve been going there for years, starting with a weekend each year, then a week, and now we try to get there for a week and several weekends each year. We like it there, the beach is beautiful, and it’s generally quiet. There is plenty of activity for those so inclined, but this year we literally rented beach chairs for 7 days straight and sat on our backsides. We walked, talked, read and just generally chilled. And I took a few photographs. Not many, but I managed to haul myself out for sunrise a few mornings, and even got Kathy to come with me for one (I promised her breakfast!).
Sunrise on the Beach, Hilton Head Island, SC
One of the best things about “going to the beach” for us is the state of mind we go with. We don’t live hectic lives by a lot of peoples’ standards, but it gives us a chance to “put it all away.” And yes, while the DNC was perhaps a historic event, just because it happened to be in Charlotte didn’t change my lack of interest, and it certainly didn’t give me reason to turn on the TV. We don’t watch TV anyway, so we certainly don’t do it at the beach. I guess we had a TV, but I never opened the doors of the entertainment center to look.
Sunrise on the Beach, Hilton Head Island, SC
I do very little blog reading or Facebook on vacation. I don’t have a need to post constant “jealousy updates” that my friends can “Like” and tell me how lucky I am. I do some photography but that is not the focus of our time or attention there, and unless I have a rainy day with nothing else to do, I’ve gotten completely away from processing photos. I prefer to live in the moment, and the minute I put my nose into the computer screen “the moment” goes away.
The same holds true with writing. I sometimes think I’d like to spend some time writing while I’m at the beach, but instead what I do is think and take notes. For the same reasons I don’t like to process photos, I don’t want to take time and attention from being there. In many ways I write for escape, and when I’m already “escaped” I want to keep it that way. So I think my thoughts and make my notes to refer to later when something sparks the need to write. I plant seeds. I like it that way.
Sunrise on the Beach, Hilton Head Island, SC
We don’t completely escape from reality on vacation. Hilton Head has numerous wonderful restaurants. We have a number of “have-to” favorites and always like to try some new places. This year the new ones were about 50-50 successful, some of the old ones are getting a little old, and a few places we had been to only a few times but tried again were worth a visit. We sometimes get out to do some shopping or visit a gallery or two, but this year the weather was so beautiful we didn’t have a reason to leave the beach. We do more of that in the winter if we visit in January or February.
Sunrise on the Beach, Hilton Head Island, SC
But we’re here now, back to “reality” for a little while. I’ve got some photos to share and a few stories to tell. And we’ll be back to our usual traveling routine after a few weekends at home. So, sorry if you missed me, but thanks for sticking around.
The Whalehead Club at Currituck Heritage Park near Corolla, North Carolina
I set this up to auto-post on 9/1 and hopefully it will work!
This is one of my favorite photographs from a visit to the northern Outer Banks back in 2009, and I thought it might make a nice intro to fall. The nice clear sky hints at the return of autumn while retaining just a hint of summer’s warmth. I had walked around this building earlier in the day and loved the windows. The possibility of a reflection of the sunset in those windows at dusk were what brought me back.
The building is known as The Whalehead Club and is located at Currituck Heritage Park near Corolla, North Carolina. It is the restored private residence of northern industrialist and conservationist, Edward C. Knight Jr. and now houses the Whalehead Club Historic House Museum.
Frog’s Leap Public House Restaurant in Downtown Waynesville, North Carolina
Several weekends ago, Kathy & I were having an interesting discussion about why someone should or should not shoot in Program or Auto mode on their camera instead of using one of the “serious” modes such as Manual, Aperture Priority or Shutter Priority, and what might be right or wrong with that. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that, actually.
Kathy knows more about the workings of a camera than a lot of people I know who have spent much more time in photography. But she also knows that trying to remember all those things can sometimes take the fun out of just going out and making photographs. So she asked me, and we talked about, “what’s wrong with just shooting JPEGs in Program Mode?” What’s wrong, indeed? Kathy & I were talking more in terms of the camera, in many cases, being smarter than we are. And to a certain extent, she makes a very, very good point.
Frog’s Leap Public House Restaurant in Downtown Waynesville, North Carolina
My very first SLR was a Konica TC that I bought back in the late 70s, and while it had a meter, it was Manual everything, so when I set the aperture, a little needle would tell me whether my shutter speed was high or low, so I adjusted until I had it where I wanted it. And I learned about things like exposure compensation the hard way, after I got the film back and tried to remember what I did! But because I first learned photography with a camera that only had manual controls, it’s pretty easy for me to think in terms of aperture or shutter speed on the fly – I have “Program Mode” in my head!
I put the Konica away sometime in the 80s then shot for years with a number of different point & shoot cameras while the kids were growing up. This worked fine until I decided to get back into photography more seriously and bought a Nikon N70 around 2000. It had auto-focus and auto-metering! But I mostly shot it in Manual and Aperture Priority because that’s what I was used to. I would venture to guess that most people buying that camera, however, probably shot it in Auto mode.
Light fixture in Downtown Waynesville, North Carolina
Shortly after buying the Nikon, someone suggested that I needed to buy a medium format camera, so I went out and bought a Mamiya 7 rangefinder and a 65mm lens. Soon after I added a 50mm lens and a 150mm lens. That camera was manual everything with a funky little meter that, once you learned how to use it, worked pretty well. Again, I was perfectly comfortable with the manual exposure controls and manual focus, because that is how I learned. I eventually ended up trading all that Mamiya film stuff in toward a Canon 5D. And I’ve wished for that Mamiya 7 back until recently, when I got my 5D Mark III. That is the first camera I can say is better than the Mamiya 7, but that’s a story for another post.
In a recent post on his blog, Paul Lester talks more about how people are perfectly satisfied with photos they are taking with their phones. No controls, no exposure compensation, no thought, just point and shoot. Paul recently met and talked with photographer and teacher Ibarionex Perello who told him that he no longer teaches aperture in his classes, because no one wants to know about it. Students can’t be bothered learning about depth of field or the effect of aperture on shutter speed. They just want to take pictures. I’m sure some of them will eventually drift into the World of Manual as they explore various creative options, but most of these students will be perfectly happy using their cameras in Program mode, and if they want to get creative with their photos, they can always do that later with software.
Shadows and Gate, Downtown Waynesville, North Carolina
Along this line, some of the commentary surrounding the recent Canon EOS-M camera has fascinated me. Like the Nikon mirrorless cameras, they are designed to shoot primarily in Program or one of the various “custom” or “scene” modes. While they do have the ability to shoot in a manual or semi-auto mode, those controls are menu-based instead of accessed simply by turning a dial or two. This has fostered some real debate. Hardly anyone has actually touched one of these cameras yet, let alone shot a few photos with one, but immediately the analysis and commentary began. People started using words like (and you can find them easily) “crippled,” “mundane, run-of-the-mill, off-the-shelf-with-spare-parts,” “uninspired,” No EFing Viewfinder!!! Well that is a deal-breaker for me.” Every camera that is introduced inspires its share of forum jockeys who are too busy making excuses about every camera that comes out that they never get around to actually taking photographs. Give me a break!
Yellow Coneflower at Beartrail Ridge Overlook at MP 430 on the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina
Do you honestly think that a company with the research and marketing budget that Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Olympus, Sony and others have is going to bring out a brand-new camera that is such an immediate failure that no one will want it? Probably not. It’s just that so many of these photographer wannabes think that no one else in the world could possibly want to shoot in Program Mode. In truth, I think these cameras are aimed squarely at a very clearly-defined market. It just ain’t us, sorry. Canon will probably sell millions of those cameras. And that will fund the next 5D megacamera that I’ll want!
There is absolutely no reason that a person with a basic level of interest in photography has to shoot in anything but Program to be serious about their photography. Granted, for a lot of us more serious folks, the ability to control exposure and depth of field is critical. But we often forget how long it took us to get to the point where we were comfortable with manual controls. I shot in Manual for years before I really learned how to control background blur or balance exposure between a bright sky and a dark foreground. But today, some cameras can figure that out for you, and for all the money we pay for our equipment, we might do well to just let it!
Yellow Coneflower at Beartrail Ridge Overlook at MP 430 on the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina
So anyway, someone who is starting out and just wants to let their camera take pictures will do perfectly well over 98% of the time. And if they shoot JPEGs and learn how to properly expose their shots they won’t need to work on their photos in software. What a deal! I know a number of successful commercial photographers who shoot everything in JPEG and beat the snot out of a lot of people who shoot RAW. Granted they are probably using manual controls and are sometimes using studio lighting, but if you know what you are doing, it’s no different than shooting slide film. Remember that?
In many ways, photography is like riding a bike. We don’t start off riding the fanciest machine that a Tour de France participant would ride. As kids we start off with a single-speed bike with training wheels. As adults getting back into cycling we might dust off the old “10-speed” and ride it around for a while. Eventually we will decide that we could be more comfortable, ride faster or generally be happier with something newer, lighter or more advanced. If we get really serious we buy the shoes, the jersey and the spandex shorts so we really look the part.
The same holds true for photography. Those starting out will use their phones, their point & shoot cameras or their SLRs – all in “P” mode. And for most people that’s as far as they’re going to get. A few of them will start experimenting with things like depth of field and shutter speed and realize that the camera they are using might not suit their needs. At that point they might move up to something with more manual controls, or they might just make do with the camera they have.
Bluegrass player sculpture in Downtown Waynesville, North Carolina
Kathy understands a lot of the mechanics of photography, but wants to spend more of her time looking at the scene in front of her and pondering composition and expression and less of it on figuring out the right f-stop. And I support that. If she gets turned off now by all of the technical stuff and gives up the camera entirely, than how is that success? If she can enjoy what she is doing now, and later gets to the point where she wants to do more with the controls, I think that is perfectly fine. And if she never moves beyond the “P” setting but enjoys her photos, that is perfectly fine and I support it! There are many ways to do this photography thing, and very few of them are wrong!
Bluegrass player sculpture in Downtown Waynesville, North Carolina
South Beach Marina, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina
This year has truly exemplified the term “roller coaster ride.” Kathy’s Dad died last week after an extended illness. Her Mom died in May. They had both been ailing for quite some time before they moved to an assisted living facility in April of this year. In between we managed to squeeze in a trip to the beach, several weekends to the mountains, including a great weekend with friends at Shenandoah National Park in April. Then her Mom died in May, later in the month we took a wonderful vacation to Alaska and California, and since then we managed to sneak in a few weekends away, but in general the last several months were consumed with taking care of Kathy’s Dad.
It’s been a tough year.
Kathy & I love to travel, obviously. And we often use our travel as a way to escape – both mentally and physically – from our everyday realities. The last 6 months or more have been emotionally and physically draining, and we feel fortunate to have been able to intersperse the grief and sadness with some well-timed getaways.
Beach at Sunset, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina
It’s surprising how the body and mind can take on additional burden without us realizing it, until such time as the burden is lifted from us and we realize how much we had been carrying. We are starting to feel that lifting now, and it may take a while longer before we fully appreciate it.
We were talking with friends this past week and one of them mentioned that we would be “trying to find our new normal.” That comment hit home for both of us, and we have talked about it a lot over the last few days. I really like the concept of “a new normal,” as if feels like what is happening to us now (I say ‘us,’ but of course Kathy has been carrying the burden, and I have been supporting her as much as I can).
It’s a huge change, to go from caring for two people who have loved you for your entire life to having them gone completely in a few short months. I went through it myself years ago and it still comes back and smacks me in the head when I least expect it. And I suspect it will continue to do so for a long while to come.
South Beach Marina, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina
The attraction of this “new normal” idea is that it presents one of those rare times when we have at least a little bit of influence about what that “normal” looks like. Will it mean big changes for us? Probably not. But I know that losing both of my parents at an early age – my Mom was 53 when she died, my Dad was 54 – has had a profound influence on how I have looked, and how I continue to look, at my own life as I approach (and hopefully pass) those ages. Let’s just say that I’m hoping for a heck of a birthday party for July 2013!
The concept of “a new normal” is very appropriate to me, because it aptly describes the adjustment process that inevitably takes place when a major change occurs in our lives. Many of these changes are very subtle, such as not having to remember to make a phone call, or not having to plan our route so we come home via Statesville. Some of them are pretty major, as in the fact that having someone living close by and being primarily responsible for their care was one of the major influences to us in terms of staying in the area. Does that mean we’re going to sell the house and move to Alaska? Not today, but when we do decide it’s time to sell the house – which is the only “physical” thing keeping us here – who knows? The kids are here, and our jobs (for as long as we want them or as long as our employers want us) are here. But fewer ties mean more possibilities. And that is what “new normal” means for me right now. What will it mean in a few months or a few years? Time will tell, but I’m looking forward to figuring it out.
South Beach Marina, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina
We had already planned a trip to the beach over Labor Day weekend, but we had an opportunity to extend that into a full week. I think a week of sand, sun and ocean will do us good. Some quiet time to think and talk, a nice beach for long walks, and a number of good restaurants where they treat us like locals. It is one of our favorite places to visit, and a good place to start getting in touch with our new normal. Indeed.
I mentioned in several earlier posts that I had just about run out of hard drive space, and that coincidentally one of my three drives – the one that had been my main working hard drive for three years – had been acting weird and giving my trouble. I switched over to one of my backup drives, relegated the old main drive to temporary backup status, and ordered new hard drives. Exciting, huh? Non-photographers can probably stop here…this is as good as it gets!
This past Monday I took delivery of three new 2 Terabyte Western Digital My Book Studio external hard drives to replace the 1 Terabyte drives I had been using. It wasn’t a hard job, in fact it was remarkably easy. But given that those drives contain all my photos from the last 8 plus years, I wanted to shut down Lightroom and stop processing photos until I was finished. The third drive finished copying sometime this morning. It took about 15 hours to copy the data from the old drive to each new drive, but now I have three identical copies, one that stays connected to my computer, one that lives in a cabinet in my home office, and another that lives offsite at my work office. I then use SuperDuper! to run incremental backups on a regular basis. I did a backup on each of the new drives just for fun, and each one took 30 seconds. But of course nothing had changed, so that was what I expected. No problemo.
Acquainting Lightroom with the new drive couldn’t have been simpler. I opened up Lightroom, pointed it to the new main drive, and in seconds it was synched. Piece-o cake-o! Back in business and ready for a few more years worth of photos. Hopefully another 3 or so years, but it’s hard to say. These files are getting rather large!
I finally got a chance to spend some time at the computer today and decided to work with some of my fireworks photos from July 4th. I knew when I took the photos that I would be making some composites in Photoshop. These were all taken handheld with the 5D Mark III and the 40MM 2.8 pancake lens, f4 at ISO 3200. My shutter speeds ranged from 1/5 to 1/50 of a second.
All the photos had some initial processing in Lightroom, including a little sharpening and noise reduction, then were composited in Photoshop. Once I brought the composited file back into Lightroom I added a little more punch in contrast, vibrance and saturation.
There’s no question that these are more than a bit over-the-top from the standpoint of reality, but that’s what artistic license is all about. This is what I saw and this is what I felt, so here it is!
This was the first time I had used Photoshop on any 5D Mark III files, and I must say that I seriously challenged the capabilities of my 5 year old iMac. Each file is around 1 GB, and I had some serious beachball action (it’s a Mac thing) going from time to time. If I do much more of that I’m going to need to look at upgrading the computer hardware a little sooner than I planned.
Kathy & I had been trying to find a weekend to head to Waynesville, NC – our favorite little town in the NC mountains – since March. With the exception of our Alaska and California adventure, things just haven’t been very conducive to getting away for the last several months. We finally had our chance this past weekend and took advantage.
As luck would have it we didn’t get a lot of relief from the high temperatures, as Waynesville – while about 10 degrees cooler than Charlotte – was still unseasonably hot, to the point where most of the HVAC systems were doing their best to keep up. Most of them were up to the task, a few were not.
We wisely headed out early and got our in-town sightseeing done early. In the heat of the afternoon we headed up to the Blue Ridge Parkway for a few hours, and while it was 97 in town, it was an unusually warm but relatively cool 84 at Waterrock Knob, an overlook and visitor center at 5,820 feet. After a stop for ice cream it was back to town for a nice dinner and some rest in our thankfully-air-conditioned room.
Sunday was spent getting back to reality, and after a stop in Statesville here we are. A couple of work days with a holiday sandwiched in, and before we know it we’ll have another weekend!
No serious photography this trip, but I had a camera with me at just about all times!
This vacation was our first visit to California, so naturally our visit to California’s Wine Country was our first visit there as well. It was something we had been planning for a long, long time and as we sailed back to San Francisco from Alaska we were very anxious to get the next step of our vacation started!
Once we disembarked our cruise ship in San Francisco on Wednesday morning our first order of business was to get a taxi to the airport to pick up our rental car. This was sort of bass-ackwards as the airport was the opposite direction from where we wanted to go, but that turned out to be the cheapest place to rent a car. Plus we wanted to be able to drop the car off at the airport on our return as it was much more convenient. After an exciting ride with a Greek cab driver (You like my driving, no?”) we made it safely to the airport and navigated the rail system to the rental car desk. Soon we had our car and were back on the road.
We had Wednesday afternoon, all day Thursday, Friday and Saturday for our adventure, so we wanted to make the most of it. Our first order of business after crossing the Golden Gate Bridge was to locate Highway 1 and head toward the coast. Our intention was to stop at Muir Woods National Monument, but for some reason the place was packed – on a Wednesday! The main parking lot was full, the over flow parking was full, and the overflow for the overflow parking was full and people were parking on the road. We decided to drive on, and people were parked along the road for nearly a mile from the entrance. We hadn’t done any research ahead of time, so maybe the place is always that crowded. I’d sure hate to go there on a weekend if it is even busier. Amazing! We’ll have to do that another time.
After a brief stop at the Muir Beach overlook to get a view of the Pacific Ocean from the land side, we headed on North along Highway 1. What a view! Nothing like we get along the East Coast, that’s for sure. We stopped at a little restaurant in the town of Stinson Beach for lunch, then headed inland toward Santa Rosa, where our hotel was located.
We knew that with nearly 4 days, we would have plenty of time but we also knew that we had a lot to see. We also decided that we didn’t want to have a “death march” through wine country, although how hard is drinking wine, right? Seriously though, this was less about seeing how many wineries we could visit or how much wine we could drink and more about seeing the countryside, exploring side roads and having plenty of time to enjoy our time there.
We had started planning our visit several months in advance, and with the invaluable advice and assistance of our good friend Jon Dressler of Dressler’s Restaurants in Charlotte, we had arranged private tours of 4 wineries. Two of our tours were on Thursday and two were on Friday, with one tour each morning and one tour each afternoon. We purposely left Saturday completely open in order to see what else we wanted to do. As it turned out we used Saturday to visit Napa, as none of the wineries we visited were located there. We had an 11:00 flight on Sunday, so that day would be spent solely on travel.
We used the four scheduled tours as the framework for our visit, and I think it worked out very well. We got an early start each day in order to have as much “piddle time” as possible with plenty of time to get to our first destination. We left time between tours for lunch, with plenty of time to drive to our afternoon destination. Our standard practice after the second tour of the day was to head back to our hotel, make a dinner reservation on Open Table, then take a nap. Like I said, no Death Marches for us!
Three things stand out to me from our visit:
(1) Distinctive geography – we always hear about the differences in climate, soil and terrain and how those differences affect the grapes and ultimately the taste of the wine. It’s one thing to hear, but to actually the area is to appreciate the descriptions. When someone describes a wine as coming from grapes “planted on a steep mountainside at 2500 feet” or coming from “the sandy and rocky soil of the Carneros Valley, it really drives home the distinctions that each area has to offer.
(2) Each winery has its own very distinctive character, from the style of the building, the layout of the winemaking area to the design of the bottles and labels. What I love about this is that it really allows us to enjoy the wine as a unique statement of everything that goes into the product. Each bottle is a representative of the winery, since every decision about every ingredient and every step of the process has some kind of an impact on the final result. Just like photography, everyone starts with the same basic set of tools but ends up with their unique expression of those tools.
(3) Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, is the amount of passion that people have for their business, from the winemakers to the tasting room people to the staff in the restaurants we visited. The people we encountered were visibly passionate about their work, and that passion is contagious. This made visiting the wineries, dining at the restaurants, and generally visiting the area a very pleasurable experience.
I’m going to have more to say about our experience in future posts, but the time since we’ve returned has slipped by in a hurry. I wanted to get this post wrapped up so I can “put a bow” on the overview and get back to some specific commentary about other parts of our vacation. Hopefully this collection of photos will provide a bit of a sampler of the 4 days we spent in wine country.
