photos- new and improved, I hope

My photography background paper came today, so four hours later I had things set up in the basement.  I'm missing one light, but tried taking one picture just to try it out anyway.  Looks promising.  I chose this particular salt pig to photograph because of its highly reflective glaze.  It gave me fits to photograph before- all that glare to deal with.

 I saw this set-up for photographing pottery some months ago- http://dmichaelcoffee.wordpress.com/2011/07/12/shots-of-pots-on-the-cheap-and-low-tech/.  I was reluctant to try it out because it looked like it takes a fair amount of space. But I was taking so much time fussing with lighting and not getting satisfactory results, I finally gave in to trying another way.  This is a cheaper version of Michael Coffee's set-up.  That's foamboard being used as the reflector panel.  I'm using a 13 watt daylight compact florescent bulb in the clip-on lamp.  The backdrop paper is supposed to be neutral gray, which is one of the colors Michael recommended, but they sent me thunder gray.  So I'll pick up another light soon, play around a little with the positioning of the foamboard, and see what happens. 
Update- I had an email conversation with the company that sold me the paper.  They said they have two warehouses and neutral gray is labeled thunder gray at one of them.    

acorn pottery on etsy.com

Well I finally got a few items on etsy.  I obsessed over the quality of my photographs and decided to just go with the best I can do right now.  It takes a lot of time to list, but maybe that's because I'm inexperienced.  I couldn't help but think, as I was spending hours yesterday taking photos and more hours today listing items, of how this process was cutting into my production time.  Anyway, here's pictures of what I put on etsy so far:

By the way, if you're wondering what happened to my archives, I'm wondering that too.  I was playing around trying to get a link to etsy on the blog and the archives disappeared.  I don't know that that's such a terrible thing, but it's annoying to know one keystroke can wreak such havoc and not be able to figure out how to un-havoc it.

lightbox experiment

I've been wondering how to take the professional-looking photos like I see of some people's pottery.  Recently, I read about how to make a lightbox to achieve the effect I'm looking for.  You cut the top, left, right and front sides out of a sturdy box.  I know what you're thinking- what's left?  But you leave only the edges for support like a frame, then cover sides and top with interfacing.  The interfacing lets the light through, but cuts down on the glare- a problem with photographing pottery. And lighting from different angles reduces shadows. These are my first attempts from last night.  I definitely need to tweak before I get the results I'm looking for.  This finial is from a firing I did Saturday.  The glaze, by the way, is new.  I don't think these photos do a great job showing the color.  It is a nice stony matte- some taupe gray with blue-green flecks and a little warm tan of the clay body showing through.   

This view, on white poster board background, still shows glare.  One problem is the left light is not a daylight bulb so I have a yellow tint on that side and right side light was higher wattage. 

Here is the set-up.  I taped one layer of interfacing on sides and top, then draped some more over box when I found one layer wasn't enough. The posterboard is attached near top back of box with a couple of tacks.  Used my son's old computer desk to set this on so it would be at a comfortable height to photograph.



This picture is lit from the top only.  I used black posterboard this time.  I didn't like most of the photos with this background.  I guess this sound strange, but the black posterboard looked too much like posterboard.

Another on black background lit from top.  Yep, a lot of figuring out to do yet.