As mentioned in the PAD for yesterday we had a weekend getaway to this place, which is a working winery with a bed and breakfast sideline. Actually "B&B" doesn't do it justice. There are two bedrooms available, both luxuriously appointed and each with a large bathroom. One has a private courtyard and balcony, while the other (ours) is on this side of the building and overlooks the vineyard and river located behind me. Not that you could see much of either in the early morning fog which is evident here, and would have been even more so had I not whacked on a Levels adjustment layer to squeeze the contrast a little. But it's a very tranquil view when visible.

The bedrooms lead on to a high-ceilinged, tastefully furnished communal living room with a slow combustion wood fire for when the weather is cold. All of these are located down at the far end in this shot. Unfortunately the other couple (a young couple from Britain doing doctorate research at the University of Western Sydney) beat us to the only board game that both of us knew how to play (Backgammon) so while we waited for dinner we just reclined on the leather couches, read some of the tourist material and listened to the music system.

Somewhere around the middle of the building is the kitchen/ dining area.

The winery has a long and varied history to it, which I would recount here if I was certain that I accurately remembered all of it. The B&B is run by a husband and wife team with some help from their son, though the husband appears to handle all of the "front of house" work. The wife is an excellent cook and none of us had any complaints about either the dinner or the breakfast the following morning.

Ebenezer (and the Hawkesbury region generally) is not a place to get your heart racing, but if you want some down time you can do far worse than here. Unfortunately most of my viewers are from off shore and that will never be an option for them. But, you know, in theory I mean.
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Update April 2025: 11 years have passed since the shot was taken. Well, almost. There is a reason that I'm updating this one now.

On Flickr I'm compiling my Book of Firsts album, being the first shots taken with various camera gear. This was the week before my Olympus E-M1 Mk I arrived. Although I didn't know it at the time, this would be the last day that I would use the Olympus E-P1 pocket camera which had been my main workhorse since the demise of my 24-105mm f/4L lens the previous year.

(There is always a "last time" that you do anything. Go to a specific cafe. Catch a specific train or bus. Go to a particular store. Use a floppy disk. Buy a CD. Use a camera. Rarely do you know it at the time; life moves on and you don't even notice it until it becomes nostalgia. Shots like this are always a reminder. Who knows, I may consider doing a "Book of Lasts" album at some point too.

I'd say that this also applies to something like using Levels adjustments layers as I mentioned doing in the original description, though that's not entirely true. Photoshop guru Deke McClelland would always recommend using levels adjustments, and only going to the more complex Curves adjustment layers if you had to. Chris Orwig, on the other hand, suggests going straight to Curves given that they are less of a blunt instrument and give you a finer level of control and greater subtlety. Eventually I sided with Orwig and when I redid the image to get rid of the PBase account watermark, I replaced the Levels layer with a Curves one. I do occasionally still use Levels layers, but rarely.)

I did lend the camera to someone to shoot a wedding in December, but for me, I would take only another 39 shots with it, all on this day.

Correction: That is true of photo images. However I just found that on 14 June I used it for a video of the unboxing of the E-M1 from which I grabbed a still.

The other issue with the passage of 11 years is this; I don't know how old the couple running the winery were, but they weren't young. The winery is still listed on accommodation sites... but the window of ever returning there is probably closer to closed than fully open.