An Impossible Dream
So tell us about Crofamiul Wines name and image...
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, c1591/1595,
Ahh, so let me start with the disappointment. There's a Janet and Peter funny story about the formation of the word crofamiul. Google it and you won't find it anywhere. But it's not for the telling here; it's much better shared personally with good humour and a glass of Crofamiul Wine.
But the story of the journey which led to the creation of the image is worth telling in pictures. A couple of years back we installed some gates at our property. We engaged talented local metalwork artist Voytek Kozlowski to design and make them for us. We'd originally thought a marine/whale theme would suit, but Voytek in his enthusiastic style said something like "no, no, you must have a connection with the eucalyptus trees on your property", and so off he went and designed the two gates with stylised gum leaves and nuts, one of which is here on the right.
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Once the gates were in place I knew that somehow I wanted to incorporate Voytek's design into our label design, but didn't know much more than that. Then one day I was chatting to another talented local, Wine Marketing Consultant and Graphic Designer Belinda Hopkins on an entirely different matter. Bel said that she'd love to do our design work, and that we'd be her first ever wine label! I was both pleased and honoured.
​I sent her a copy of the picture above, and without thinking much about it gave her a broad "work your magic" brief. Pretty quickly she came back with "I'll need a somewhat cleaner image than that", not unreasonably.
So the next step in the process required me to remove the gate and then position it with a blue background and photograph it free of distortion and shadows (technical specs - image taken at ISO100 with shutter speed 1/100 sec at f/5.6 on 70 mm focal length, cropped but not colour adjusted) .
The resultant high-res image (left) was sent off to Bel, and then she worked her graphic design magic to create the "strained glass" image representation above.
This has now been settled upon to become face of Crofamiul Wines.
I love it.