The great part is, of course, that I get to try any tea that I want. In fact, after each tea is photographed (only about 1tsp is used at a time), it would otherwise be thrown away. I couldn't just allow all of that tea to go to waste.
Unfortunately, I was photographing large groups of teas at a time (50 teas per hour, roughly)... so trying each one wasn't really practical. And in fact, I don't really have any interest in trying most of the flavored teas or herbals. But I did get a chance to try several teas that were new and interesting to me. I also learned a fair amount about green pu-erhs. The resident tea expert at the store was a pu-erh fiend, and although I had previously avoided the whole genre in the past, I found that there are some really exquisite ones out there.
Anyway, since my photos are just standard catalog photos, there's not thing particularly interesting about them... but I thought I'd post a couple. If you'd like to see all of them, feel free to take a look at http://www.everythingtea.net ; I'm sure the owners will be happy to have the extra traffic.
Thought this was interesting... pu-erh sold in its bamboo aging basket.
One of the pu-erhs that I tried and found to be quite good.
Even though I'm not really a fan of flavored teas, some of them were still pretty to photograph.
Usually I like lightly oxidized oolongs (typically high mountain oolongs from Taiwan), but this Dan Cong was also really good, and not like others that I have tried.
Anyway, I just had to share this experience with someone else who would appreciate the splendor of the thing :) I'm going to make sure that I work exclusively for Tea Shops in the future!
As Ever,
J. Matthew Gore
