Balancing Work and Passion for Photography
Sometimes life gets in the way of photography.
Rollback to the beginning of March 2025 when the Marlborough grape harvest got underway, I was starting my fifteenth harvest at the winery I work at, and it turned out to be the largest grape harvest on record. For about a six-week period the winery operated 24/7, and I was working dayshift from 7am-7pm six days a week. It was truly Eat, Sleep, Work Repeat.
During previous harvests I was able to use my camera to document the harvest, 2025 was not one of those years and I struggled to find time to get my camera out at the winery. I did manage to capture video of the first fruit of 2025 being received by the winery, and as I live in a vineyard near to the winery, I was able to capture some video of a harvester operating on a Saturday evening when I got home from work.
Harvesting Grapes
I have a Canon Pixma TS9560 A3 printer at home, so in any of my spare time over the harvest period I prepared images for printing and also printed some images using the Canon Pro Luster A3 paper and I’m also trying the Ilford Smooth Pearl A4 paper. I’ve only done one print so far with this paper, I liked how the colours were a lot richer compared to the Canon matte paper. I normally print from the print module in Adobe Lightroom, but lately have been using the Canon software as I can print images using custom frame sizes.
Below is a selection of images I have printed and the paper I used.
You can check out more of my prints here.
On one of my days off I spent the afternoon out at Rarangi Beach, shooting video at different frame rates. Below is some footage of the waves crashing on the rocks. The video was taken at 100fps.
Below is the video of the first fruit being received by the winery.
First Grapes of 2025