(4) The Wine Is Strong

Penfold winery isn’t far from Adelaide city, the day was cloudy when we visited it, not a good day for taking selfies for tourists - I don’t usually take photos of landscape, so it doesn’t matter too much to me. I brought GX85 with 12-35mm lens for convenience. When we arrived at Penfold, its signature red immediately attracted my eyes.

There wasn’t too many people in the winery, and the layout of buildings here is special, not sure how it was designed when it was built. There are many apartment buildings in Melbourn which have strange shapes, because they have to conform to council standard, for example, each room has to have a minimum time facing sun light, in order to satisfy all the requirements, the final design would look like an UFO. However realestate developer would say it’s artist design and use it as a selling point.

On the wall there’s a small round window, and there’s a red strip below it, red is the signature of Penfold. Is the strip only for decoration? Without the strip I could imagine the wall would look dumb with only a small window, people inside the room would feel a kind of pressure, like a prison; Having a strip line extending towards left and right gives a feel of expansion which is opposite to small and close. These subtle details were were noted in the theory of Feng Shui, but people nowadays consider it as superstition.

According to Feng Shui, based on the shape of the small window and strip line, they form a 0 and 1 relation, just like Yin and Yang in Taoism, it’s the basis of everything, just like 0 and 1 are the core of computer science.

I don’t know what photos to take here, so I’ve kept the zoom lens on the tele end, and focused on details.

I might be a nostalgic person, looking at the year I just wanted to photo it without thinking about composition.

Door of wine, I don’t know how to open them, whether there’s wine inside. Look at the details of the wall, M43 sensor isn’t worse than cameras with larger frames under good light, of course, you need to use something not Lightroom, like DXO Optics. Lightroom is full of features and support a large range of formats, however it’s like a parent who’s too ambitious for their child and send their child to all the after-class interest-oriented classes, in order to have their child fully developed in different fields, the result is often that the child become mediocre in each of the fields.

A teacher in university told us that we can’t write the same essay gain, that’s self-plagiarism; in the same class we also reviewed some artwork of Salvador Dali, whose work uses a melting style that all the objects in his painting looks bonelessly melted. I wondered if he was also self-plagiarism for re-using the same style. If reusing style is OK, I also found a photography style, which is to take photos reflected in glass.

I started to understand what Cartier Bresson said, wide angle twists one’s field of view, eyes could only focus on something in a narrow field of view, also, the background compression is different with wide angle.

Corner of wall painted in red.

Apart from what you normally see when visiting a place, you could also look at the ground.

The wine shop was nicely designed, attention paid to details - the symbols on toilet sign mimics wine bottles.

Rows and columns.

Wine menu.

The lighting in the shop looks similar to many of the luxury shops, maybe this kind of warm light could let product feeling more classy, however the customers here are noisy and keep asking for wine taste, which doesn’t echo well with the tone of light.

After Penfold, I was on the way back to Melbourne. Adelaide in general feels more comfortable and quiet, of course, it might be that it was the first time I visit here with an attitude of travel and relaxing, everything was fresh to me. It’s like the feeling of the first time one falls in love, the first time lovers meet, slowly the excitement would disappear with time. However, just like photography, even if it wasn’t a sunny day, even if the winery was empty, using a different focal length that you don’t normally use, view the scene from a different angle, you would find something new and interesting; After becoming accustomed to the focal length, switch back to the focal lengh you used previously, you would still discover things that touch your heart.

I thought Adelaide was interesting because I was visiting for the first time, if I stay here I would get bored some day, but after that I would re-discover something interesting when I view it from a different angle. Probably everything in the world fluctuates between two sides, just like Yin and Yang, they complement each other, the key is to look for things on the good side. Photography is exactly like this, so is love and life.

Part 3: If life is always like first seeing - Adelaide (3) Slow City, Flying Life