English Estate Winery - Wine Tasting

My friend Jamie's mother recently won a free wine tasting session for 20 people at English Estate Winery in Vancouver, WA. This brought a bunch of old friends together to catch up, which was really cool.

Since I don't drink at all, I figured it'd be a good opportunity to try a hand at filming an event. It was a pretty intimate affair and not an official filming gig, so I wanted to keep a pretty low profile. Wide establishing shots, detail footage and most of the candid footage shot from a distance with my 85mm lens on a tripod.

It was wonderful catching up with friends, so I did my best to split my time between gathering footage and mingling. Hopefully I didn't disappear myself behind the camera too much!

So I guess on to the tech talk. Got to use my Atlas 10 linear tracking system more yaay. It's also more simply known as "the slider" in my book, haha. Shooting video hand held with my D3S has proven a wobbly mess every time I've tried, so I used a monopod for all the candid shots. It helped quite a bit, although I'm heavily considering a full on video monopod for even greater stability (keeping that side to side wobble under control with a long lens was annoying). Oh also, it was a bit dark lighting condition wise for filming. But I just used fast lenses wide open and shot at ISO 3200. It makes manual focusing fun!

The time lapse shot I set up outside I'm pretty happy with, although it took some work, since headlights from passing cars (far behind camera) resulted in a strobe light effect in the sped up footage. Agh. Fortunately the final shot looks way better, me having gone in frame by frame and taking out the brighter headlight shots.

Anyway, here you go. It's a fun little vignette of the evening. And a big thanks to Jamie and David for inviting Kelly and I! It was great catching up!