Wine tasting

Posted by Andrew Gould (Sydney, Australia) on 4 March 2008 in Lifestyle & Culture and Portfolio.

Taken on the 1st of March 2008 at McGuigan's Wines in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales, Australia.

A pleasant weekend away that gave me a few shooting opportunities as well as a chance to sample the wines.

And just in case anyone's wondering, those ARE big bottles! They're not the standard 750 ml ones, but are 1.5 litres.

The optical stabilizer in my lens helped me out greatly here, by the way.

Sigma 18-200mm f3.5-6.3 DC OS

A note on postprocessing:
Although this was (as usual) shot in RAW, I hardly did any modification of the file in Adobe RAW in Photoshop. I've been finding lately that I get better, more natural looking results by working more in Photoshop on the 16 bit TIFFs that I convert from these RAW files, even though the latest version of Adobe RAW has a huge amount of options available. This could be just because I've become very familiar with using my favourite filters and tools in Photoshop.

(For anyone who doesn't know about the advantage of 16 bit Tiff over 8 bit, a quick search on the Internet will produce many results with information on this.)

In this photo, I straightened the verticals so as the bottle on the left was falling over a bit to the left. I then cropped off the excess uninteresting area at the top. Auto color, reduced to 25% with the History Brush plus a bit of a boost in saturation -- especially for the greens -- gave me just the colours I wanted. I also used my all time favourite Shadow/Highlight filter to avoid a burnt out look in the brightest highlights and to bring out sufficient detail in the darker background area.

For upload to aminus3, I resized with Photoshop's Image Processor and sharpened with the Smart Filter, which I now use all the time instead of the Unsharp Mask.

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