Lifestyle Photography Ad Campaign
Sonoma County Winegrowers Association (Healdsburg, California)
Sonoma County Winegrowers Association hired Siegel + Gale of San Francisco to run a national campaign for its network of wineries in the county. The agency contacted me with brief that basically boiled down to “family” and the deep ties that these multi-generational agricultural families have to the land. Intimate family moments and emotive portraiture drove the sun-soaked, lifestyle narrative, shot over a season of grape growing in California’s Wine Country.
Photography + Direction: Kaare Iverson
Agency: Siegel + Gale (Omnicom)
H&M: Sarah Ashton
Digital Tech: Soraya Matos
Lighting Assistants: Paulo Placencia, Michael Jirkovsky
Published in wine and tourism magazines through the USA, these full-page ad spreads centered on family values, agricultural roots, and the spirit of winemaking in California’s Wine Country.
The brief called for intimacy and authenticity. I worked with each family weeks in advance of the shoot to scout, build rapport, and collaborate on developing lifestyle narrative scenarios that authentically represented the labor and culture of wine grape agriculture in Sonoma County. To keep the energy and movement natural on set (especially with variables like dogs and children), we opted for mostly natural light management, flying scrims and silks to subtly soften the hard, natural light and augmenting with strobe to carry the look of natural light further in the scene.
The photography drove tourism and traffic to the region through the initial ad placements, and went on to support the trade group for years through paid digital and social.