Vineyard Photos of New Growth

I love going out into the vineyard at this time of year to take pictures.  The yellowy-green color of the new growth is beautiful, and the cover crop is in full flower.  Plus, the hills are gorgeous.  Note that you can get full-screen images of all the photos on this post (and, for that matter, this blog) by clicking on the thumbnails.

A hillside of Grenache is well out, with a small block of Mourvedre visible to the back right barely sprouted:

The trick for me in catching these shots is being able to get the position of the sun correct.  In order to really showcase that yellow-green, you need to be taking the photo into or at an angle into the sun, but without getting glare.  A Chardonnay vine (from our small block for our Antithesis Chardonnay) glows with sunlight:

The other thing I try to get in the photos is a sense of (for lack of a better term) near and far.  Using a zoom to shorten the field of focus helps.  The photo below is of the same Grenache block as the first photo.

Finally, a more traditional view, looking east over a hillside of newly-sprouted Roussanne back toward west-facing Scruffy Hill, still in shadow in the early morning: