We had a great time doing laps down Minneapolis’s historic Main Street, Craig on his swank ride, me flat on my belly in the back of my mini van, strobe clamped to the open hatch back, Craig’s friend Hunter doing an admirable driving job not crashing in to Craig or anything else. Best of luck to Craig on his award nominations!

1. You like to cook.
2. Chemistry holds some appeal.
3. You’re pretty sure drinking beer is fun.

Find a friend with overlapping interests, and you’re in business.

Conor Lawrence and the gang at 514 Studios/Callahan & Co. have been brewing for longer than I have, and for years they’ve been brewing up a house recipe – Dirty Larry Brown – giving bottles away to clients and friends. When Conor told me the story of Dirty Larry Brown over coffee recently, I thought it would make for a fun photo shoot, documenting the making of a signature calling card of their business, while at the same time giving a sense of 514 Studios as a place. And a project was born.

Home Brewing at 514 Studios – Images by Chris Bohnhoff

(hover over images for occasional captions)

If you’re unfamiliar with the beer brewing process, it’s a pretty simple deal. The alcohol is created by taking the sugars from roasted and dried barley and other grains, boiling them in water for an hour or so with hops for bitterness and floral taste and smell characteristics, then cooling it down to room temperature and storing it for a while with some special yeast. The yeast eats the sugar and releases alcohol. Voila!

Of course there are countless variations of grains, hop varieties, and yeast strains to choose from – not to mention enough gear to keep any guy with his face in a Northern Brewer catalog for hours at a time. And for the OCD crowd, there’s the lingering danger that one small bacteria could get by your fastidious cleaning routine and skunk the whole 5 gallon batch. Ask any home brewer about any one of these nuances and you’re liable to be roped in to an hour and a half conversation. With any luck you’ll get a beer or two out of the deal, but just be warned.

In the brew pot the day I swung by was a recipe by the name of Ferocious, modeled after a certain aggressive local IPA favorite. The beer called for what some might consider a ridiculous number of hops, which Conor models in a few photos in the gallery. But the fun – and my favorite photos from the shoot, from a brewer’s perspective – came when it was time to transfer the wort (the raw liquid that will be beer after it ferments for a while) from the boil kettle to the carboy. Since there are always hops and other things in the wort, the boil kettle has a screen over the spigot to keep the non-liquids out of the carboy. But our boy Ferocious had so many hops that it clogged the screen and wouldn’t let any liquid through. Problems. So then Conor and his friend Dave tried bypassing the spigot and pouring through a strainer and in to a funnel. Then that clogged! Finally, other options defeated, the rest of the whole hoppy stew was poured straight in to the carboy.

And you know what? It’ll be delicious.

Thanks to Conor and Dave for sharing space, time, and brews. Looking forward to bottling.

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.

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!

Which is one of the reasons I’m so excited to be working with them on their imagery – you can see the first newsletter I shot for them in PDF form here. The other reasons to be excited: great people who are fully willing to collaborate on the vision of a story, a mission that I wholeheartedly believe in right in my backyard, and amazing layout and branding provided by Spunk Design Machine.

Our first project was a backyard barbecue to highlight the August Eat Local promotion.

For you photog-types out there, a note on the lighting. I was absolutely excited about the evening sun blaring in from behind, but using only natural light would either have blown out the background and washed out the vivid color on the table, or left everything not the sky way under-exposed. So I set my base exposure to where I wanted the background to be, then I set two speedlights back from the near corners of the table to provide fill. The sweet spot was an exposure that gave highlights from the strong backlighting, with just enough fill to give detail and max color on the table and on peoples’ faces. The two speedlights were set to identical power, providing an even field of light over the table and subjects, giving me the ability to change my angle and not have to worry about resetting the lights. Then I could concentrate on composition and directing the subjects.

Valcucine is a beautiful line of high end Italian cabinetry, with clean modern lines that fit the loft aesthetic perfectly; they’re designed with the European living space in mind, where efficient use of small spaces (compared to the usual American house, that is) is a requirement. But unlike certain other European furniture makers (cough cough IKEA cough cough), Valcucine’s stuff is built to last, with an eye towards sustainability and nontoxic production methods.

My writer friends from the Sample Circuit and I visited the Valcucine showroom last week to do an advertorial showcase piece. Valcucine corporate has some beautiful photos of the actual product, so we decided to focus on the shopping experience.

Mostly I’ve been enmeshed in various marketing stuff. Moving my portfolio from agency to agency, sometimes talking to the art buyers, sometimes just leaving it to its own fate for a day or two on a conference table. Launching a Facebook ad campaign for my wedding business. Poking around Twitter. Doing a bunch of work in an effort to increase my Google page rank and tweak my site for better search engine optimization.

It’s all important stuff, and for all you small business types, you know how it is trying to drive business: completely emorphous, seemingly random, and demanding a skill set that is entirely separate from what drew you to go in to business in the first place.

So you end up becoming an expert (or at least picking up just enough knowledge to be dangerous) in all sorts of stuff that you never expected – or wanted – to know anything about. For me that’s my budding understanding of how Google ranks pages. I’m lucky to be part of an industry that does a great job of information sharing, through groups like the American Society of Media Photographers, and businesses like PhotoShelter, and the heart of the photo blog community that I’ve come to know (Chase Jarvis, Strobist, APhotoEditor to name my favorite few), all of whom have been hammering away for months on the ever-growing importance of good organic Google search results for your site. Here’s the high level view of what I’ve learned so far, and have been trying to implement wherever I can:

• Using the keywords that you want people to find you by in your page titles is important, and the order of your words makes a difference. For example, “Chris Bohnhoff Editorial Photographer in Minneapolis” isn’t as good as “Minneapolis Editorial Photographer Chris Bohnhoff”. A little counter intuitive, but that’s what they say.
• Packing keywords in to the meta:keywords and meta:description fields in the head section of your html code makes a small difference, but should still be done.
• Also including keywords in photo captions, file names, and alt text fields is key.

Then there are incoming links, which apparently is 60-70% of what makes up search ranking. That means getting yourself listed in reputable online directories, blogging, commenting on others’ blogs, tweeting, being active in as many online communities as possible. (I’ve almost convinced my wife that reading blogs counts as work, but she hasn’t completely bought in yet.)

I’ve only begun this process, and I’ve got a long way to go, but that’s the deal: continuous improvement. What’s interesting to me is how Google has codified the importance of interconnectedness in setting the importance of links so high. To be a success in Google’s world you have to convince people that you have content worth linking to. Sure, you can pay to include yourself in a fake community. Or you can put in the time to forge actual connections with people online. Weird.

Like I said, I’m early in the process, so leave a comment and correct me if I’m off base, or if you have anything to add on the topics of online marketing, the experience of being a wearer of many unexpected hats, whatever. And next time I’ll get back to the pictures. . .

A lot of what I do is story telling through environment: somewhere in the frame is a person, and all around that person is their world. I may tweak things a little, but I value photographing people’s lives as I find them; I generally don’t see it as my job to create an idealized version of a person. I think it’s much more fun, and more effective, to reflect as much reality as possible. That’s where I feel like I bring the most value as a photographer. But I digress. . .

Food pictures make you look a little more closely at the things in a very small area. Which is fun, because you get to see how much attention, expertise, and care are packed in to a piece of food. And for the food maker, the stuff on the plate is a small bite of their life. That’s what I was thinking about photographing the process of making the delicious little creations cranked out at BT McElrath Chocolatier last week.

Chocolate truffles waiting to be packaged

Chocolate bars in their molds

Artwork getting applied to truffles

Truffles coming off the line

Some of BT McElrath's signature pieces

More at chrisbohnhoff.com