Work from this year

Four jobs we can show in full, with the light we had, the crew we sent and how long the files took.

Man in a camel coat on wide concrete steps, low gold sun across a modernist facade — Lookbook for a tailor on Strada Ismail. Rîșcani, 17:05, the last eleven minutes of sun.

Winemaker standing among oak barrels in a stone cellar under tungsten bulbs — Cricova, gallery 14. One LED panel bounced off the vault.

Wine bottle, glasses, walnuts and grapes on a limestone slab — Hall B window, 11:30.

Portrait of a winemaker in a limestone cellar

The cellar keeper

A family winery wanted a film about the man who has looked after their barrels since 1991, and portraits for a new tasting room.

The cellars at Cricova run through old limestone quarries, and the galleries we were given sit around 80 metres down. It is twelve degrees all year and close to saturated with moisture, which means two things for a crew: condensation on every lens that comes down from a warm van, and no daylight at all.

We brought the cameras down the night before and left them in their cases to settle. For light we used what the cellar already had, the warm bulbs strung along the vault, and added a single LED panel bounced off the stone ceiling to lift faces without flattening the barrels. Every frame in the film is lit that way.

Domnul Vasile did not want to be interviewed, so we did not interview him. We followed him for a day as he tapped barrels and checked the drain channels, recorded him talking to the cellar master, and built the three minutes from that. The portraits were made in the last hour, when he had stopped noticing us.

Delivered: 3-minute film, two 30-second cuts, 22 portraits
Crew: Director, two camera, sound, stills
Shoot: Two days, September
Final files: 9 working days after wrap

Man in a camel coat on concrete steps at sunset

Coats on the concrete steps

A tailor on Strada Ismail makes eleven coats each autumn. They needed a lookbook that felt like the city they are worn in.

Chișinău has more good concrete than most capitals its size: the housing blocks and public buildings of the seventies and eighties, many of them faced with pale stone panels that take low sun beautifully. We walked Rîșcani and Botanica with the tailor for two afternoons and chose four buildings where the steps face west.

In mid-October the useful light on those steps lasts from about 16:40 to 17:15. We shot two evenings, three coats per evening at most, and spent the rest of the day in Hall B photographing details of the cloth against the plaster wall in the same warm window light so the catalogue reads as one season.

The model is a student from the Academy of Music who walks past one of the buildings every day. We cast him there.

Delivered: 38 finals, 64 detail stills
Crew: Photographer, assistant, stylist
Shoot: Two evenings, one studio day
Final files: 5 working days after wrap

Unlabelled wine bottle with glasses, walnuts and grapes on limestone

Fetească on limestone

Stills for a new Fetească Neagră before the label was printed, so the bottle had to carry the picture on its own.

We asked the winery for a slab of the same limestone their cellar is cut from. It arrived in the back of a Dacia and now lives in our props room. Under a single hard window it gives the grain and the long shadow you see here, the kind of texture a seamless paper never will.

The grapes are late Fetească from the client's own rows, the walnuts from the market on Strada Mitropolit Varlaam. Glasses were filled with the actual wine and replaced every twenty minutes, because red wine under strong light changes colour faster than people expect.

The label was added later in retouch from the printer's files, aligned to the curve of the glass.

Delivered: 14 finals, label versions for 3 vintages
Crew: Photographer, food stylist
Shoot: One day in Hall B
Final files: 4 working days after wrap

Market vendor arranging herbs and quinces under a canvas awning

Market at seven

A food magazine asked for twelve pages on what grows around Chișinău in October, photographed where people actually buy it.

Piața Centrală opens early and gets crowded by nine. We came three mornings in a row at 6:30, without lamps or reflectors, just one photographer and a writer who speaks to the vendors in whichever language they answer in.

The canvas awnings over the vegetable rows do something useful in the first hour of sun: they soften it into a large, warm source just above head height. That is the light on the pumpkins and quinces here. By 7:40 the sun is high enough to clear the awnings and the effect is gone.

Everyone photographed agreed on the spot and received prints on our next visit. Doamna Elena asked for two extra for her daughters.

Delivered: 12-page editorial, 41 images
Crew: Photographer, writer
Shoot: Three mornings
Final files: 3 working days after the last morning

Contact sheet, autumn in the city

Frames from the last eight weeks. Scroll sideways; each one snaps into place.

Operator filming an empty boulevard under chestnut trees — Ștefan cel Mare, Sunday, 7:20

Woman in linen by a tall window — Hall B, 15:40

Vendor at a vegetable stall in morning light — Piața Centrală, 6:55

Winemaker in a vaulted cellar — Cricova, 80 metres down

Man in a coat on concrete steps — Rîșcani, 17:05

Grading suite with vineyard footage on the monitor — Grading room, vineyard plates

Wine still life on limestone — Hall B, 11:30

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