Revisiting the Texas Hill Country Wine Project after some time has passed. A nice process while waiting for a different project to upload....

I had a lovely portrait session in my studio today at 11:00 a.m. My subject, Steve C., is the new president of an insurance company that provides coverage for Texas lawyers. I've been making portraits for this client for around ten years and several years ago we (the ad agency and I..) decided to change up the style a bit and photograph each board member and company officer against white, and then composite the selected portrait image with an interesting architectural background photograph . Steve was one of a long list we've done in this fashion since we started it. 

I photographed Steve against a long roll of white seamless paper and used a 200 watt LED light in a big octagonal softbox as my main light. A second, gridded LED fixture was used to light up the background. Steve is around my age ( maybe a bit younger) and we had a very nice conversation about raising kids (he has three, all in college) and travel (he's just back from an Italy trip with family). 

I used the big Fuji MF camera with the TTArtisan 90mm f1.25 lens stopped down to f4.5. The images turned out well and since I had to wait for 90 big files to upload to a Smugmug gallery I opened the "old" Texas Hill Country Wine folder and started looking at my "keepers" collection. There are about 125 frames in the keeper category but I only included a few here. 

I would have put up a portrait of Steve but he hasn't seen them yet and we have protocols to follow there. 

The wine photos came mostly from four different cameras used pretty much interchangeably.  They were the Pansonic S1, the Sigma fp, the Leica SL and the Leica SL2. The lenses that got the most use were the Leica 24-90, the Sigma 24-70mm Art lens, and the Sigma 45mm f2.8 (mini) lens. It was a fun project for me. I'd happily sign up to do another one. 

Now that I've typed this the other files (Steve's portraits) are ready so I'm off to complete that gallery. Then it's out for a lovely Halloween walk. And the weather is beautiful.