Around Arandas

Pics from last Saturday’s trip to Los Altos de Jalisco. For the record, Siete Leguas’ factory is closed on Saturday afternoons…

Tilt-shift Agave Field

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There’s a technique known as tilt-shift which makes your photos look like close-ups of a miniature landscape by throwing sections out of focus and whacking up the brightness. It usually takes a good half hour of fiddling with images in Photoshop to achieve the effect and I’ve never really been happy with the results. However, Tiltshiftmaker.com makes things a lot easier…

This photo is from the toll road back from Tequila. We were travelling in a teeny tiny little car…

Fermenting agave juice in a 32,000 litre vat

After the agave piñas have been cooked for a day or so, they’re mashed up and the juice heads to huge fermentation tanks that bubble and produce a sweet, sticky heat. When they’re done fermenting they’re distilled and after that bottled or barrelled. This photo of the surface of the tank was taken in the new tequila factory of El Tesoro de mi Tierra in Tototlan (The place of the birds) in Los Altos (the highlands) of Jalisco.

Tequila Tesoro de mi Tierra…

…tastes very nice indeed and the management over in Los Altos treated us to tacos and a good few sips before a tour of their new factory. The set of some of the pix are over here. In other news I’m photographing some tequila bottles for a new range of Tulum themed premium tequila. Tomorrow I’m heading off to Home Despot to construct my very own homemade lightbox.

Agave Tequilana juice fermentingAgave Tequilana juice fermenting away

Web design’s coming along nicely too. It’s been a good week all in all. Atticus has been up and down mind, in all senses. We took him to the vet’s yesterday for his immigration papers, he didn’t take to kindly to the “probe” but I think that’s fair enough, who would? Sita’s flying back with him to LA to drop him off in Downey Doggy Heaven next Thursday… I behaved myself very well at the dentist’s today too. Without a shadow of a doubt the worst thing a dentist can do is the teeth cleaning thing. I’d rather any other procedure. Lower jaw removal, wiring for fairy lights, tongue electrocution, you name it. Oddly enough, my second ever entry in my blog over 3 years ago was about the same thing. Anyway, I’ll be back again tomorrow and again next week for more dental fun. It’s only 8 doors away from our house so I don’t have to travel far for intense discomfort.

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Because of the rubber cheque thing and the number of projects we’ve got going between us we’ll not make it to San Miguel this weekend for the Grito and the national Flickr gathering but that’s fine. We keep busy. Sita’s about to embark on a series of interviews of tequila consumers. You might be next. And we’ve got to nip back to Tequila too…