This month is on track to be the wettest October in Minnesota history. From most perspectives it’s been miserable: cold and damp, constantly overcast. A tough time for people like me who think of fall as the best, most beautiful time of the year, as all the rain has kept me indoors and caused the premature dropping of all those beautiful leaves. Not to mention how hard the weather has made things like fall harvest and yardwork.

But a couple days ago we had a one-day respite from the clouds, so I sped down to the vineyard before the clouds swallowed the sun again to check in on Nan and V in the fields.

These days the task is pruning back the vines of the one variety of grape that gets buried for the winter. Most of the varieties grown by Alexis Bailly stay on the trellises year-round and get pruned in the Spring. But one gets snipped in the fall, then buried as protection against the cold. As Nan explained to me, pruning is one of the main tools she has to impact the character of the grapes: the shape of the canopy, and the direction that the vine takes along the trellis directly shape a grape’s flavor profile. Pruning is an art built on years of trial and error, and it takes constant evaluation.

It’s interesting to watch an expert make her way down the a line of plants and quickly and efficiently sculpt vines in to shape. Pruning takes many quick decisions and movements; grape vines are such prolific growers that each one takes tens of snips. And there’s the medical exam part of the process, looking for small injuries in the vine that are all that soil-borne plant viruses need to take the entire vine down. And at the end of a growing season that started with a harsh winter, the medical exams can end up coming back. . . not as good as you’d hope.

But as Nan told me, many times she’s predicted the vineyard’s demise, and it keeps hanging in. All you can do is keep nurturing.

Grape vines, after the leaves fall

Pruned

A small but terminal injury

More of the Alexis Bailly story available here, and on the Alexis Bailly site.

Lately I’ve been laying the groundwork on a couple personal projects. The Alexis Bailly Vineyard series is one, and another is still trying to get rolling. Starting these projects can be kind of a funny process. At the very beginning I have to have a conversation that starts like this: Hi! You don’t know me, but I’m a photographer, and I’d really like to take your picture.

Most people react with questions like, Who the hell are you? Why me? What are you going to do with the pictures? People are conditioned to be suspicious of attention directed at them by people they don’t know. So at the very beginning of a project, when I approach someone for the first time with this completely unexpected idea, there’s this period of only a few minutes where I need to show that I mean no harm, or the project is never going to happen.

As I’ve thought about it, I’ve realized that building trust is the base of almost everything one does as a photographer.

• Working with new commercial clients – and booking weddings – comes down to whether people can rely on you to be creative and professional every time out.
• Gaining access to people and places hinges upon your ability to empathize with people and understand what you’re asking them to do for you, and be sensitive to their situation.
• Establishing a business network is nothing but trust. Even building a base of blog readers is a matter of getting people to trust that you will have relevant things to share on a regular basis.
• Once the camera finally gets picked up – what it all comes down to – trust between a subject and photographer is the start of making any amazing picture.

If I can’t inspire trust in the people around me, that’s a real problem.

A few weeks ago my wife Johanna and I took a trip down to the tasting room at Alexis Bailly Vineyard, just south of Hastings, Minnesota – about an hour’s drive from Minneapolis. It was a beautiful late-summer Saturday, and unbeknownst to us, the last day of the grape harvest at the vineyard.

The vineyard grounds are beautiful: the driveway takes you through rows of vines stretching out to the left and right, and behind the main building (made of knotty pine and Minnesota limestone) is a restored prairie and broad picnic grounds with big outdoor sculptures scattered around. Off to the side are two beautiful bocce courts with an outdoor dining area under vine-covered trellis.

As Johanna and I ate our picnic lunch and sampled from A. Bailly’s wines, I had a growing awareness of the harvesters having a great time at the end of a day of picking. Somehow we learned that the entire harvest workforce is made up of volunteers, and that there are actually more people that want to help every year than they can even use (and feed lunch and wine. . .).

Producing wine has got to be one of the pinnacles in the world of local food – not only are you dealing with the economics and all the physical realities of agriculture; you’re growing a crop that is extremely temperamental, with an attachment to a microclimate that takes years to completely work out. A couple of the big varieties that A. Bailly grows were actually developed at the University of Minnesota to harmonize with our climate; others have been brought in and tweaked over the 35 years the vineyard has been in existence. Add all this together, and what I see is a pretty amazing little community brought together by local food artistry of the best (ahem. . . alcohohic) kind.

Before we left I had decided that I wanted to know more about A. Bailly – I wanted to know more about the process, not just the harvest but throughout the year; about the community; about the balance that Nan Bailly has to achieve between being a farmer, a vintner, and a small business owner. Lucky for me, Nan is super open to people interested in what’s going on at her place. So after a few emails I went down last week for my first wander around. My plan is to keep going back as I’m able for the next year to get a sense of one cycle of grapes, starting with a little bit of the fermenting and bottling of this year’s crop, all the way through next year’s harvest. Hopefully by the end of it I’ll have a big pile of images that tell a story.

And with that introduction, here’s my first installment: some visual first impressions and wanderings around a working day at the vineyard. More personalities, perspectives, and stories to come over the next year.

Thanks to Nan, V, Kevin, and Joan for humoring me and letting me distract you from your work. And thanks for reading!

A writer friend of mine just posted a thought provoking piece about finding motivation and accountability as a freelance writer, but it really applies to any creative doing personal work. The question is, who’s your boss? Who do you report to? The very pointed follow up question: if you’re freelance (or if you’re employed as a creative but have personal projects on the side) and you don’t have a boss figure, did you know that your chances of success drop significantly?

After a few months of consciously building a team of collaborators and ‘bosses’ (see the Big Project posts), I can attest to the importance of not going it alone. Creative work is first and most importantly an exercise in self-searching. You explore your perspective on the world and create something that communicates that perspective. Without creative collaborators and bosses, it’s so easy to look at finished work and disappear in to the woods of self criticism, or on the flip side, to make work that is meaningful to you, but doesn’t speak to anyone not occupying your own brain. It’s only through sharing with some kind of group of trusted people that creative work gains legitimacy and confidence.

If you’re in the process of building (or rebuilding) your portfolio, or writing something big, or contemplating a career change, find yourself a boss. I can say that in my experience, ironically, by finding someone to act as your judge you’ll feel more powerful and confident almost immediately.

For the latest cover of Seward Coop’s Sprout! magazine we did a faux apple harvest. Faux because of the fact that our location – a small apple stand at the Dowling Urban Environmental School – had plenty of apples, they were just rotting under our feet, not actually on the trees. But when you’re trying to illustrate the fall harvest, and you’re about a month too late to harvest (and it’s about 80 degrees, but when the issue comes out it’ll be 50), what are you gonna do? You’re gonna fake it, that’s what.

Photographing kids is always an attempt to organize sheer chaos, but these guys did a pretty great job pretending to be cold and pick pretend apples (they did actually eat the apples – that wasn’t a problem).

For those of you photo lighting aficionados out there, an explanation of the first shot above. As you can see in the first shot, the sun was pretty low in the sky when we did the shoot. I knew that there was going to be some action going on, and that it would need to be frozen for the main shot of the family at least. Given that the natural light was fading, and we were in and out of dappled sunlight, I knew there would be some lighting happening.

I love using the sun as a backlight – even putting the sun in the frame to get the nice rings of color – then pumping something in as a key light in front, so that’s what we did here. I had my assistant TJ climb a tree camera right and direct a Quantum Q-Flash towards the family. When combining ambient and strobe lights the main question is what exposure value do you want to give the background in relation to the subject, being lit by the strobe? I really wanted a bright background to give the scene as much warmth as possible, so I adjusted my exposure to give the trees in the background plenty of detail, and to blow out the highlights. Then I adjusted the Quantum to give a good exposure on our family, and blasted away.

First time I’ve ever asked an assistant to climb a tree for me. . . hopefully it won’t be the last.