Photographing in a Wine Cellar

How to get good photographs from photographing hand-held in dark conditions.

I was at a fabulous winery in Napa Valley, California.  (If you’re a wine lover like I am, you don’t need me to tell you that Napa Valley is in California so my apologies.)  The winery was Castello de Amorosa – the Castle of Love.  It is a replica of a medieval Italian castle.

Now let me clarify a misperception about the castle.  A rumor is going around that the castle was dismantled in Italy and reassembled in Napa Valley.  Not true.  Some pieces of the castle were brought over from Italy but the bulk of it is local stones.  Nevertheless, it’s a beautiful and authentic replica of the real thing.  It has a great room, chapel, a torture chamber, and honest to goodness wine cellars lined with hundreds of barrels of aging wine, which, by the way, is quite good.  (Don’t look for this wine in markets or gourmet restaurants however.  The only place it is sold is at the winery.  But if you would like to tour it, give me a call and I’ll meet you there.)

I was with a group, participants in the workshop I was leading, and we got a private tour.  We all had our cameras at the ready and were photographing just about everything, even the torture chamber (especially the torture chamber?).  The wine cellars were very dark, however, and the aisles extended for hundreds of feet.  There were dim light bulbs sparsely scattered the length of the aisles.  Some of the barrels had labels on them.  Celebrities frequently bought an entire barrel of aging wine, so these barrels were set aside for them.

I was eager to photograph the wine cellars but there was an exposure problem to solve.  I don’t have a tripod, I’m shooting hand-held, so I can’t rely on a lengthy shutter speeds for a good exposures.  So, each side of the exposure triangle posed a challenge and required a solution.  Let’s start with shutter speed.

What shutter speed should I use for handheld shooting?  Well, that depends on the focal length of the lens.  After all, the rule of thumb for sharp handheld images is 1/focal length.  OK, I knew that.  The lens I was using was my go-to 24mm to 105mm lens.  I didn’t want to have to change my shutter speed every time I zoomed to a different focal length, so I chose a speed of 1/120 sec that covers all the zooms up to and including the longest.  Now that’s really fast for a dark environment.  But hold on.  The lens has image stabilization which is good for 1 to 2 stops.  In other words, I can increase the exposure time by 1 to 2 stops and still get a sharp image.  So, being the cautious guy I am, I chose 1/60 sec.

But wait, I normally shoot Aperture Priority where the camera chooses the shutter speed.  Gotta switch to Manual.  OK, that’s done, and I set the shutter speed to 1/60 sec.

The next decision to make is the aperture.  If I shoot wide open, which for this lens is f/4.5, I don’t get the depth of field I need for shooting down the long dim aisles.  Now the depth of field will vary with the focal length so if I’m shooting at 24mm then I can use a fairly wide-open aperture but if I’m shooting at 105mm I need to stop way down, say f/11.  Once again, I didn’t want to have to change the aperture for every shot, so I went with f/11.

But a relatively fast shutter speed and a smaller aperture severely reduces the amount of light that passes through the lens and falls on the sensor.  That leads to the final decision.  What ISO should I use?  And not having eyes that work like light meters, I don’t have a clue.  Furthermore, something has to change from one lighting condition to another.  And since I’m setting and forgetting shutter speed and aperture, that adjustment falls on ISO.  Let the camera set the ISO.  Fortunately, my camera has Auto ISO, so I switched from ISO 100 to Auto.  And I’m all set.

Since the cellar is much darker than a sunny day at noon, the camera selected the higher ISOs and in the really dark places, maxed out the ISO.  As a result, many of the photographs have lots and lots of noise.  At the time I took these photographs, Lightroom’s noise reduction was state of the art, but state of the art then was not very good.  But that has all changed as a result of the AI tsunami and how everyone is going bonkers over it.  Lightroom now employs AI in their noise reduction function and it’s like magic.  The only thing is it can take a long time to do its magic, sometimes as much as 10 minutes and even more.  Oh well, it’s a small price to pay for a dramatically improved image.

So, here’s the camera’s setup.

  • Manual camera mode
  • Shutter speed = 1/max focal length but compensated for taking the lens’ or camera body’s image stabilization (vibration reduction for you Nikon folks) into account
  • F/stop that gives the desired depth of field for your longest focal length, such as, f/11.
  • Auto ISO

In the digital darkroom, Lightroom now has the power to deal effectively with the noise that the highest ISOs will invariably generate.  You may want to use third party noise reduction tools such as Topaz DeNoise AI which is faster than Lightroom and works as well with light to moderate noise.  But it’s more expensive than Lightroom, given that you’re already paying $10/month to use it.

OK, so that’s it as far as the photography aspect of Castello de Amoroso goes.  We ended up in the tasting room of course and I bought a rather expensive bottle of cabernet – 3 figures.  It was so good I couldn’t resist.  When I got home, we prepared a very special meal and opened the bottle.  Both wife and daughter said it was the best wine they had ever tasted.  I must confess, it was awfully good!

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Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams brought beauty and inspiration to thousands of people. Read his story and how he became such a beloved photographer.

“I tried to keep both arts alive [concert pianist and landscape photographer], but the camera won.  I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can!”  ~ Ansel Adams

The Early Years

On February 20, 1902, Ansel Easton Adams was the only child born to Charles Hitchcock Adams and Olive Bray Adams in San Francisco, CA.  His ancestors immigrated from Ireland in the early 1700s and his grandfather was a wealthy timber baron, a business which his father eventually inherited.  It is ironic that Adams detested the timber industry later in life.

Ansel Adams at his Piano

At the age of 4 the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 hit.  The Adams family house made it through the initial quake unscathed, but Adams’ father thought it best if they sit out the aftershocks outside.  A particularly large aftershock caught Adams by surprise, knocking him down.  He landed face down against a brick wall and broke his nose.  A physician suggested that it would be best to wait until Adams matured to set the broken nose.  Later in life, Adams said, “apparently I never matured, as I have yet to see a surgeon about it.”

Adams was a problem child.  He was sickly, sometimes spending as much as a month in bed.  His Aunt Mary gave him books to occupy his time.  One was the Heart of the Sierras which apparently planted an interest in these magnificent mountains in his young mind.

When he started school, he was so rebellious that he got expelled from one school after another.  Finally, when Adams was 12, his father faced the inevitable and withdrew him from school for a year.  A private tutor was hired so that Adams could continue his education.  During his time, he was exposed to the works of the great artists.  This lasted for one year before he returned to Mrs. Kate M. Wilkins Private School where he graduated from the 8th grade on June 8, 1917.

During this time Adams started playing the piano.  At first, he was self-taught but when he was 12, he started receiving lessons.  The discipline of daily practice apparently helped him to gain some control over his disruptive behavior.  Adams commented about that time.  “The change from a hyperactive Sloppy Joe was not overnight, but was sufficiently abrupt to make some startled people ask, ‘What happened?’ I still recall that the Bach Inventions taxed my concentration, especially when a sunny breeze carrying the sound of the ocean stole through the open window.” As he progressed, his passion for the piano continued to grow so that he planned on becoming a world-class concert pianist. 

However, the tide started to change imperceptibly.  In 1916 he persuaded his “Uncle Frank” to take him to Yosemite, a destination that he was inspired to see from the books his aunt had given him while he laid ill in bed.  And at the same time his father gave him is first camera, an Eastman Kodak Brownie box camera.  It was on that trip that he took his first photographs of Yosemite.  He later commented, “The splendor of Yosemite burst upon us, and it was glorious.  There was light everywhere.  A new era began for me.”  That was the first of an annual pilgrimage to Yosemite that would continue throughout his life.  But he still planned on being a concert pianist.

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Henri Cartier-Bresson

“I kept walking the streets, high-strung, and eager to snap scenes of convincing reality, but mainly I wanted to capture the quintessence of the phenomenon in a single image.  Photographing, for me, is instant drawing, and the secret is to forget you are carrying a camera.  Manufactured or staged photography does not concern me.  And if I make a judgement, it can only be on a psychological or sociological level.  There are those who take photographs arranged beforehand and those who go out and discover the image and seize it.  For me, the camera is a sketchbook, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant, which in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously.”

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

Early Life

On August 22, 1908, Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, Seine-et-Marne, France.  His father was a wealthy textile merchant and his mother’s family were cotton merchants and owned land in Normandy.  His father saw him as heir to the family business, but Cartier-Bresson wasn’t interested in being a businessman.  After failing the baccalaureate exam three times, at the age of 17, he made is point and received permission to take painting lessons from the French painters Jean Cottenet and Jacques-Émile Blanche.

Cartier-Bresson took to painting but he didn’t take to his parents’ nor his art teacher’s socially conservative leanings.  To get away from them, he went abroad to England from 1928 to 1929 to study literature, art, and English at Magdalene College in Cambridge.  When he returned to France, he settled in Paris.  There he took up with the bohemian crowd and their loose lifestyle and wild parties.  He met surrealist painters Salvador Dali and Max Ernst and was fascinated by the juxtaposition of the conscious and the unconscious that was the emphasis of surrealists.  He tried to incorporate these principles in his own paintings but was not satisfied with the results and destroyed all his prints.  However, his later street photography often reflected the surrealist juxtapositions.

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Focus Stacking in Joshua Tree National Park

As part of the Desert Institute class I was teaching in Joshua Tree National Park, we did a sunset at the end of the second day at the trailhead parking log for Ryan Mountain.  Across the road one of the participants found a composition that I liked a lot, so we talked about the possibilities.  He ended up with a nice photograph and moved on.  I spent a little more time on it because I saw that there was a depth of field problem that needed to be resolved.

The foreground was about 20 feet from the camera and the background was a least a quarter of a mile away.  At a focal length of 190 mm there was no way I could get that depth of field even with an aperture of f/32.  So, as you can see below, I did two shots, one focused on the bush in the foreground and the second focused on the outcrops in the background.  The plan was to use focus stacking to get a sharp image throughout.

Photoshop does an excellent job of focus stacking.  To get it started, I selected the two files in Lightroom and clicked Open as Layers in Photoshop… from the Photo menu.

Lightroom converts the DNG files to Tiffs and loads them into Photoshop where they are stacked as two layers, one on top of the other.

In Photoshop, select both layers and in the Edit menu first click Auto-Align Layers… and then Auto-Blend Layers…. It’s that easy.

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Edward Weston

“One does not think during creative work, any more than one thinks when driving a car. But one has a background of years – learning, unlearning, success, failure, dreaming, thinking, experience, all this – then the moment of creation, the focusing of all into the moment. So I can make ‘without thought,’ fifteen carefully considered negatives, one every fifteen minutes, given material with as many possibilities. But there is all the eyes have seen in this life to influence me.”  –  Edward Weston

Note:  Not much of Weston’s photographs are in the public domain.  Therefore, I have include links to his more important photographs so you can enjoy them.

Early Life

On March 24, 1886, Edward Henry Weston was born in Highland Park, Illinois into an intellectual family.  His father, Edward B. Weston, was an obstetrician and his mother, Alice J. Brett, was a Shakespearean actress.  His mother died when he was only five years old and little Edward was raised mostly by his sister Mary who was fourteen years old at the time.  Weston called her “May” or “Maisie.  They would develop a close relationship which lasted throughout the years.

His father remarried when Weston was nine but neither he nor his sister got along with their stepmother or stepbrother.

When Weston was 11, Mary married and relocated from the Midwest to Southern California, settling in Tropico (later renamed to Glendale).  Once Mary left, Weston’s father devoted most of his time to his new wife and her son.  He had no interest in books or school and dropped out.  He also had a lot of time on his hands and spent it mostly by himself in his room.

In 1902, while on vacation on a farm in Michigan, his father gave him his first camera, a Kodak Bulls-Eye No. 2 for his 16th birthday.  His dad included a note which read in part, “you’ll not have to change anything about the Kodak. Always have the sun behind or to the side—never so it shines into the instrument. Don’t be too far from the object you wish to take, or it will be very small. See what you are going to take in the mirror. You can only take twelve pictures, so don’t waste any on things of no interest.”

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Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange found the soul of documentary photography in her photographs of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, and those of the forced resettlement of Japanese Americans during the Second World War.

“You know, so often it’s just sticking around and being there, remaining there, not swooping out in a cloud of dust: sitting down on the ground with people, letting children look at your camera with their dirty, grimy little hands, and putting their fingers on the lens, and you just let them, because you know that if you will behave in a generous manner, you are apt to receive it, you know?” – Dorothea Lange

Early Years

Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn was born on May 26, 1895 in Hoboken, NJ to Heinrich Nutzhorn and Johanna Lange. Her father was a lawyer, born of German immigrants. Her mother was a soprano concert singer and later a librarian.

She grew up in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and attended public school at PS 62 on Hester Street. She didn’t particularly like school and often skipped classes. School didn’t become any easier for her when, at the age of 7, she contracted polio. She survived but was left with a withered right leg, a twisted, crabbed right foot and a limp that would be with her the rest of her life. You can imagine the teasing she got from her fellow classmates. Even her mother was ashamed to take her out in public. Lange expressed her attitude about her disability this way.

“I was physically disabled, and I don’t think anyone who hasn’t been semi-crippled knows how much that means. I think it perhaps was the most important thing that happened to me. It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me. All those things at once. I’ve never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and the power of it.”

When she was twelve, her father abandoned their family. It’s not known why but he was never heard from again. Lange never spoke of him. That is when her mother took a job as a librarian and the family went to live with their grandmother, Sophie.

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Imogen Cunningham

“The problem with Cunningham is her versatility. She is not easy to categorize as a portraitist, for she had no formulas and responded to each subject freshly. Consistent are her genuine interest in each person’s uniqueness, her strong sense of design, and her ability to use light dramatically.”

~ Gretchen Garner

Known as the Grandmother of Photography, there wasn’t an emerging photographic style that she didn’t explore beginning with pictorialism including her studies of flowers and continuing with the straight photography of Group f/65, modernism in her photographs of California industries, street photography during the Beat Generation age and in post-war Europe, and, perhaps what she loved the most, portraits.  Towards the end of her long career, when asked about her importance, her response was, “Well, I don’t know. It’s very annoying. It might turn out that way in the end, if I don’t do anything too dreadful from now on. “

Childhood

Imogen Cunningham was born April 12, 1883 in Portland, Oregon to Isaac Burns Cunningham and Susan Elizabeth Johnson Cunningham.  She was named after Shakespeare’s character in Cymbeline.  She had an unconventional childhood.  Her father was a spiritualist, theosophist, free thinker and vegetarian.  Her mother was a Missouri Methodist.  When Cunningham was 3 years old the family  moved to Washington to join the Puget Sound Co-operative Colony, a collective in Port Angeles with the aim of providing a secure living for employees and employers alike.  In 1901, the family left the collective for Seattle where Cunningham was enrolled in public school.  During this time, Cunningham characterized herself as “ill-tempered” and went on to say, “I was always absolutely on my own, going somewhere being interested in something, and no one in my family was interested in the same things.”

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Gertrude Käsebier

The remarkable life of Gertrude Käsebier, considered by many to be the greatest portrait photographer of her time.

Portrait by Adolf de Meyer circa 1900

She deferred her career that would bring her international fame until her three children were adolescents.  She entered the prestigious Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York at the age of 37 to study portrait painting.  At the age of 45 she opened her own portrait studios and in just three years she was considered by some to be the greatest photographer in the United States.  Here is her remarkable story.

The Early Years

Gertrude Stanton was born on May 18, 1852 in Fort Des Moines, Iowa, later to be known simply as Des Moines.  Her parents were John W. Stanton and Muncy Boone Stanton. 

n 1858 the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush erupted and in 1859, Gertrude’s father moved to the Colorado Rocky Mountains.  He ventured by himself to Eureka Gulch to try his luck.  He realized that hunting for gold was a hit-and-miss proposition but providing lumber for the building boom that would surely develop was a sure thing.  He built a sawmill and was right.  A year later, John brought his family west to live with him.  The town of Eureka Gulch was renamed Golden and became the capital of the Colorado Territory.  John was well liked and was elected Golden’s first mayor.  Many of Gertrude’s playmates in Golden were American Indians and her contact with them resulted in a deep regard for them and would be the heart of some of the most beautiful and moving portraits.

In 1864 the effects of the Civil War were felt in the Colorado Territory and John thought that it had become too dangerous for his family, so they moved back to the East Coast and settled in Brooklyn, New York.  There John worked in mineralogy and Muncy rented out rooms in their home to boarders to earn a little extra money.  Gertrude was already showing an interest in art, even at an early age.  She removed some of their paintings from the wall, placed them flat on the floor and knelt next to them, pouring over them, examining every detail with the intent of understanding how she could to that.

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Paul Strand

Photography takes few more steps forward under the powerful influence of Paul Strand.

“We realize as perhaps he [Stieglitz] did not, that the freedom of the artist to create and give the fruits of his work to people, is indissolubly bound up with the fight for the political and economic freedom of society as a whole”.

– Paul Strand

The Early Years

Nathaniel Paul Stransky was born in New York on 10/26/1890 to Bohemian merchants Jacob and Matilda Stransky, German Jews.  He was to become a legend among early American photographers whom we now know by the name, Paul Strand.

His father provided for the family by running an enamelware business.  When Strand was 12, his father gave him a camera and while this was not the turning point in his life, he was fascinated by it.

Paul_Strand_by_Alfred_Stieglitz_1917
Paul Strand

Strand spent his high school years in the Ethical Culture School, an educational institution founded in 1878 to provide free, quality education to the children of the poor.  By 1880 the school had such a high academic reputation that more wealthy parents wanted to enroll their children, at which time they started charging tuition.  In 1903, the New York Society for Ethical Culture became the school’s sponsor.  The school awarded over $55 millions in tuition-based financial aid to over 20% of its student body.

Strand joined the school in 1904 where he came into contact with Lewis Hine, a famous documentary photographer who was intent on social reform and whose photos were instrumental in reforming child labor laws in the United States.  Hine was to have a strong influence on Strand, both photographically and socially.

In 1907, Strand joined the after-school camera club that Hine founded.  One of their field trips was to Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery, originally The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 4th Street in Manhattan.  At the time, the gallery was a showcase for the American Pictorialist movement photographers as well as European painters like Henri Matisse, Auguste Rodin, Henri Rousseau, Paul Cézanne, and Pablo Picasso.  The year was 1907 and that, at the age of 17, was the experience that set Strand’s course on a life devoted to photography.  Unbeknownst to him at the time, Stieglitz would have a powerful effect on his growth as a photographer and later on he in turn would profoundly influence Stieglitz’s photography.

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Art is Interpretation

See how a photograph can create two interpretations.

We occasionally encounter an image that lends itself to more than one interpretation. Such was the situation when I was photographing my favorite bristlecone pine in the White Mountains of California. This pine is not marked, is not part of the established groves – the Schulman Grove and the Patriarch Grove. It’s by the unpaved road that leads to the Patriarch Grove. And it is splendid.

I like to arrive late in the afternoon so that we can capture a little golden hour light before it falls into shadow and the mountains slip into twilight. I have a relationship with this tree as I do with all of the locations I have the privilege to return to time after time. The relationship is not just the tree but includes the people I visited it with. But this tree has a deeper relationship than most.

The second time I photographed this tree I was with a group. One of the members had just been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer but his passion for photography and the fact that he was still feeling strong made it possible for him to participate. About a year and a half later he succumbed to the cancer. And that affects the way in which I wish to interpret this photograph.

image

With that in mind I had a decision to make as I worked on it in Photoshop. What do I want the tree to say? There were two choices: it could be the proud, noble, defiant tree raging against the coming of the night, or it could be the calm, patient, accepting tree gently entering the night without protest knowing that the dawn will surely come.

The first two adjustments did not affect the interpretation of the image. I want to darken the sky and bump the saturation a bit. I used a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and adjusted the blue channel. Continue reading “Art is Interpretation”

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