A friend recently lost his mother in Kakheti, so my wife and I came here for the funeral. Then we added some extra days to be with her elderly mother and her sister.
Georgia’s main grape-growing region had a mild winter and is now gearing up for spring. Many plants are already putting forth new leaves. Some orchards, particularly of peach trees, have started blossoming. People have been pruning their grapevines, then tying them back onto the horizontal wires from which they will continue to grow all summer long, until the glorious rtveli, or autumn harvest.
One can either use cheap string to do the vine-tying… or use what you have on hand, which is free and 100% natural. In this case, the material is leaves from corn husks. You would feed these to your ruminant livestock if you had any, but we don’t. So you tie up the vines with them, which also looks much prettier and more natural anyway. I alternate between a 10-18mm lens for the wide scene, and a 90mm macro lens to find smaller parts, even 1:1 close-ups if I want them.
It took a few days of varied weather before the long stretch of Caucasus mountains north of us performed its floating illusion. Yesterday, the hazy lower mountain heights and the sky above them reached exactly the same hue, making it look as though the white snowy layer in between the two is hovering in midair. I drove around looking for a good location to shoot a long stitched panorama of this scene, unencumbered by a foreground mess of electrical wires and so on.
My final stop of three attempts was at a gravel works, where rocks are being turned into smaller stones for concrete work. The foreman drove me up a small hill they had made for one of the conveyor belts, and from here I got 14 frames. I’m still working on this image on my laptop; it takes 20 minutes or so just to save because it’s such a big file. I normally don’t bother using a tripod, just letting the camera frame’s guide grid help me keep my images in roughly a straight line, and overlapping enough to stitch together.
I also took my wife and her mother and sister into one of the nearby towns for some banking and shopping, and on the way home we stopped at the former’s sister’s house to catch up and have lunch. I used the opportunity to photograph these two ladies in their mid-80s together, the last of their sibling set, because who knows how long we will have them with us? Reluctant apart, they let me shoot as a pair, and I got what I wanted. The mostly overcast skies eliminate hard contrast from shadows, and give more saturation and detail. I still find myself processing most of my images into black and white, though, preferring the look, undistracted by any color at all.
As I always do on these visits to now familiar territory in eastern Georgia, I have been looking for the little details which other people might live with and become so used to that they don’t notice them anymore. Whatever the season, there is plenty to draw the eye if it’s alert and on the lookout. Does that sound like a cliché? It’s my modus operandi.
Blog by Tony Hanmer
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
