Picture Perfect

With this piece, my wine journey led to a professional photographer. Richard Duval is a Walla Walla, WA-based photographer specializing in vineyard and wine-related imagery. His website is www.winepix.net Here’s a piece I wrote about him for Oregon Wine Press.

Richard’s winning photo

Some years ago, I shared with a friend my plan to write about wine.

“I envy you,” he replied, which surprised me, since I knew he rarely drank. “Wine only grows in beautiful places.”

Photographer Richard Duval has spent nearly 20 years visiting and documenting some of those locales - especially here in his native Pacific Northwest. One of his photos recently earned international recognition by taking a third-place prize at this year’s World Food Photography Awards, placing an Oregon vineyard alongside some of the world’s most beautiful places.

STORIES BROUGHT TO LIFE

Founded in the UK in 2011 by Caroline Kenyon, the competition ranks among the world's top 10 photographic contests and has received more than 120,000 entries from over 100 countries. It is open to professional and amateur photographers alike across more than 25 categories, spanning images of food growing in its place of origin to its centrality at religious festivals and around family tables.

The awards aim to shine a light on food stories from around the globe and give the discipline the recognition it deserves. "Our goal is to bring global food narratives to life: whether the beauty or the drama of food, feast or famine, weddings or food aid," Kenyon has said. An international panel of judges, chaired by acclaimed food photographer David Loftus, selects winners each year.

EARLY ONE MORNING

Duval’s winning submission catches the sun rising over a row of Seven Hills Vineyard's Cabernet Franc vines awaiting harvest on the Oregon side of the Walla Walla Valley. As he returned to his car after an early-morning shoot, the light caught his eye. “The sun was just hitting, and you could see the sun rays were particularly compelling,” he recalls. Ten minutes of shooting the scene sequentially, followed by some light digital editing, produced the winning image.

Wine photography occupies Duval full time. A varied career in public relations filled the decades after he earned degrees in journalism, marketing and communications. When hired to write promotional copy at Woodinville’s Chateau Ste. Michelle, the wine bug bit.

After walking a Red Mountain vineyard, he felt a renewed excitement about what had been a side interest. “I had told myself I was going to put the camera down, and now I had this rush of adrenaline,” he remembers. “By the time I got back home … I had it worked out in my head: I’m going to be a wine photographer.”

Coinciding with his immersion in the wine world was the digital revolution in the stock photography industry, eventually leading him to go freelance. “I just started knocking on winery doors,” he recounts, confident that his professional background offered potential clients more than just pretty pictures.

700,000 IMAGES LATER

Duval’s work is widely featured in wine marketing materials and in regional and national wine media, including Wine Business Monthly and Wine Spectator. For wineries, he provides a full range of services, from studio bottle shots and staff portraits to on-location projects.

But sometimes a striking print for display fits the bill. Duval’s prize-winner is an example of his artistic eye when not on assignment. Echoing the language of the region’s winemakers, he seeks to faithfully depict what the vineyard gives, taking a conservative approach to digital manipulation. “I’m going to just bring out what I know is there,” he says. “This is what the light did. I just tried to bring it out and enhance it.”

Duval custom prints his work on metal, canvas and lustre papers, ready for display in a tasting room or cellar. His “Art from the Vine” exhibit has been staged in venues around the region, and he even offers a line of greeting cards.

Future projects include a coffee-table book that draws on his library of over 700,000 images and incorporates essays by admired industry friends he has encountered in vineyards and cellars over the years.

“Most of the people I’ve worked with in wine are really smart; they’re driven, they have knowledge, they have passion, and they could make more money doing almost anything else,” he observes.

“How do I not want to hang out with people like them?