Not Another Learning Experience! The Pop Up Photo Booth Edition

 I unloaded a firing on Friday. It was supposed to be Wednesday, but my laptop was stolen Tuesday night, so Wednesday & Thursday were burnt up in all the process involved in that - police report, contacting my banks & credit card companies, all that stuff. Boy do I have a lot to say about that experience, but I'm gonna save it for later, because, new pots! It was kind of a shitty week, but at least the kiln didn't let me down.

I spent today photographing pots, some new out of this kiln, some that I've been planning to shoot for a while. I tried a different photo set up: one of those nylon pop up tents. A friend - Libbey Seigars of Whitefield Pottery - gave me one of those pop-up photo tents last year. She wasn't happy with the results she was getting, so didn't want it anymore. It takes me a while to get around to things, but today I finally gave the it a shot. The advantage, I hoped, was that I could just pop the tent up & start shooting, as opposed to my indoor setup which requires me to re-arrange my living room, pin up a backdrop, and set up three lights. I usually don't want to do all that for just a few pots, so I wait until I have a bunch, and then shooting & processing the images - never mind listing the items for sale - becomes an all-day deal.

That was a learning experience, and what I learned was, those pop up photo tents suck! I eventually gave up & just set up my backdrop & lights as usual. The point of the pop up booth was supposed to be that it was easier - just pop it up on a sunny day & start shooting. Well, the pop up part is easy, that much is true. Getting the wrinkles out of the backdrop - even though it was stored carefully - was not. What eventually worked (kind of) was putting it in the dryer on high heat for about 10 minutes. 

Once the only-a-little-wrinkly (me: I'll fix it in post!) backdrop was in place, I had to find a block or something to place the pots on, because the opening for the camera was a lot higher than the floor of the ten, so the camera was looking sharply down on everything. (I put bricks under the backdrop, but the angle was still not great. All of that would have been tolerable if the photos had been good but - guess what? - they weren't! 

Here are two photos of the same pot, one taken in the pop up tent, one taken with my usual photo set up: 

Taken in the pop up photo tent

Take with backdrop & lights

To my eye the second is just infinitely better. I did my best with editing but the pop up photos all had a bluish quality, and correcting it made the color of the pots wrong.

Anyway, I gave up on it. I like to learn new things but I just had too many pots to shoot to mess around much with it, and anyway I already have a system that works. 

Anybody want a free pop up photo tent? 

Pot Shots

In keeping with my 19 for 2019, one of which was "Increase online sales," I needed to do some product photography. I want to be creative with it - find tablecloths that complement but don't distract, choose fruits or veggies as accents to highlight functionality...but that was getting in the way of just getting it done, so I set all that aside for a bit to just take some basic shots. Even that is a several-hours-long-project, which involves rearranging my living room. I'm not sure I'm doing the lights right...should they be that close? idk.
Some are easier to shoot than others! Matte glazes or exteriors that are mostly flashing slip/soda glass present less of a challenge than, say, this super-glossy oribe vase! This looks moderately like crap, with all the reflections - can you see me? I should have waved - but the better ones are not all that much better.

I have about 10 more pieces to photograph today. Then comes processing! Each photo will need to be cropped & renamed, and in some cases have the light rebalanced. After that, I'll need to take dimensions, write descriptions, and then post these online. This pottery gig is a lot of work!

Stackables, Shadows, and Stone

The rough stone wall behind and the directional lighting give this stack of bowls more drama than one might expect, from cereal bowls. Almost sort of spooky, like a killer might jump out of the shadows...maybe even a cereal killer!😄

Lazy Evening

Last night was the first of many, I hope, warm evenings on the deck, drinking seltzer and being lazy.

Lazy looks different for the self-employed, however, as I'm sure my potter-ful readership is aware. For us, lazy often means "working on something other than the most important thing we could be working on;" or "working on something less physically taxing than the thing we should be working on."

For me, sitting on the deck with my seltzer water, it was Zazzle. I made a Zazzle store a few years ago, because I like to snap some photos once in a while, and once in a while I get a pretty good one, and Zazzle is something I could do with those that doesn't involve a whole new artistic business. I've never gotten a check from Zazzle, but I do occasionally get an email that I sold something. The way it works it, you have to reach a threshold of $25 $50 before they send you a check, and since I was mostly selling greeting cards, the royalty on which is something like 11¢, well, I ain't there yet. (Zazzle increased the threshold! Must have been too many people getting checks.)
But as I said, my "products" were almost all cards, or mousepads. Sad to say, the mousepad is nearly dead; and cards have that tiny royalty. You know what is not dead? Phone cases! A friend visiting during the pottery tour mentioned that he had phone cases listed on Zazzle.

So that was what I spent my lazy evening doing: choosing images and listing custom phone cases. Check them out: 

Stony Shore

Wild Mushroom

Rusty Gear

Wildflowers

Gazing Kitty

B&W Boots

2 Sheep

Daylily

BTW: do people really spend $56 on a phone case? If so I feel much better about charging $80 for a lidded casserole.

Java Wadding

In my infinite quest to replace expensive grog in my wadding, this firing I am following the suggestion of a fellow blogger and potter going by the name Newfoundout Potter. I am using coffee grounds. This suggestion appeals to both the frugalista and the tree-hugger in me: reuse! recycle! Coffee grounds are essentially garbage. We were using them in the compost pile but believe me there are plenty from this house to go around. Our compost is more acid than ideal, due to the preponderance of coffee grounds. Ooo, bad thought: our compost also sometimes smells like vomit, due to its great acidity. Let's hope my wadding does not also come to smell like vomit! That might be a deal breaker. For now, though, the wadding smells nice.

I did find that I had to use more grounds than grog to get the consistency that I want; whereas the original wadding recipe called for 2:2:1 Kaolin:Alumina:Grog, the coffee grounds version is closer to 1:1:1.

It's a weirdly warm day in Central Maine; the thermometer hanging on the deck says it's 50 F. A nice kiln-loading day.

OT: Check out my new profile photo! Turns out the same lighting set up to avoid shadows while photographing pots does a good jobs of filling in crow's-feet.

Close Your Eyes...

I hate, hate, hate not having my camera! In the meantime, close your eyes and imagine some nine-inch plates, with a shallowly dished interior and broad, flat rim. Imagine that these plates have been glazed in a high-soda-ash-content shino, and then had images painted in wax. Imagine futher that the wax burned away in the firing, and the resulting carbon was trapped in the surrounding glaze, giving it a smoky, golden hue...
Oh, never mind. I've bid on a camera exactly like the one that broke, on Ebay. My husband purchased ours for several hundred dollars, maybe six years ago. I figured with shipping, I couldn't get it fixed for less than $100; the auction price is currently at $37. This makes sense, as the camera is several years old, and only 4 megapixels, whereas 8 megapixels is standard among mid-range cameras now. But 4 is more than plenty for my needs. Nor was the one I bid on the only one available, so sooner rather than later I expect to have it replaced. (My husband swears he can fix it, but he hasn't yet, and nagging is not my style.) These plates will be off to their forever homes by then, but I'll make more, and then you'll see what I'm talking about.

Ciao for now!

A New Football for Charlie Brown

In my endless quest to fulfill the fantasy of effortless online sales, I have created a Zazzle store! The Zazzle concept is a little different, and not at all suitable for selling pottery; but as I am also an amateur photographer, I decided to give it a shot. After all, those images are not doing me any good sitting on my hard drive, amirite? And selling them as prints requires a whole 'nother level of commitment in terms of ancillary purchases, not to mention the cost of the prints themselves, and keeping them organized. But Zazzle is a way to make them available that, once set up, doesn't require any further effort from me. 

Here's how it works: I upload images, and choose products which can be made from them: tote bags, keychains, refrigerator magnets, mousepads, and, funnily enough, coffee mugs, and a boatload of other stuff. Shoppers purchase items customized with an artist's imagery, but not actually made by an artist. The artist gets a royalty, which is not very damn much, but read the part about the images "just sitting on my hard drive" again. (I admit to feeling a tiny pinch of guilt over participating in the sales of mass-produced crap, of which there is already plenty in the world.

Here's the good part. If nothing sells, I am out absolutely nothing. I am still in possession of the images & the right to use them. All I've lost is a morning at the computer. 

Wish me luck. This time I"ll kick that football from here to Australia! 

A New Idea for Etsy

You may I know I have a love/hate relationship with Etsy. I really love the idea, but hate the cult-like feeling in the forums (I know, I know, I could just stay out of them!), the time suck, and most of all, the lack of sales. I got a brainwave this morning, looking fondly at my husband's dark head on the pillow. You see, we met online, at Cupid.com to be exact. Though I am no raving beauty, I was in demand simply due to the ratio of men to women on dating sites, which is about 13:1. How would I choose to whom to respond? All of them seemed to enjoy romantic evenings at home and long walks on the beach, and also going out dancing. They were all interested in their pets and good friends and listening to music. Then I came to Doug's profile:

Hobbies: Jumping off things, & wondering why my car is suddenly really loud.
Favorite activities: Watching the wind push daisies around. Banging nails. 
Not interested in: Buying a bunch of stuff. Debt makes you old fast.

See what I mean? He stood out like a live man in a row of corpses. He wasn't too worried about scaring someone off to let his personality show. I answered him, and the rest is history. 

I decided to try and apply that lesson to online retailing. In the listings for which I don't have five photos to fill all the slots, I am putting in photos of something unrelated: a sheep from Straw's farm near Watershed, my cats looking out the window, a rusty gear. And a note saying, the sheep hasn't got anything to do with it, I just like the photo. Or something like that. 

I thought it was brilliant, so I posted it in the Etsy forums. Guess what? Everybody very very kindly said it was a stupid idea. Which only proves my point.

Well, no it doesn't. But there's this: I can't sell any less from my Etsy shop than I already am. Might as well try something different!

Photo Shoot

In winter the conditions for photographing pots are brief and fleeting at my house. Except for the smallest pots, I shoot in the south-facing living room during the perhaps three hours (at most) of daylight that the sun not at too acute an angle to cast even light. I hang the backdrop where my TV usually sits. It's kind of a hassle to get all set up, so when I do it, I try to shoot a lot of work. 

I used to only get pots photographed once a year. I'd set aside one or two good pots out of each firing, and then choose about a dozen to take to Peter Lee, when I was in St. Paul, or, later, to Jay York in Portland. I would still use a professional to take the shots if I were still applying to art fairs, but just for Etsy (and Craftgawker!), I find I can take an adequate photo myself. It's all in the right tools:

The graduated gray background I got for around $45 from Photo Tech, Inc. The camera is relatively old, an Olympus c-750, 4.0 megapixels. Five or six megapixels is standard in cameras made now, but I find that this serves just fine for my purposes. Importantly, it has a remote setting, so you don't have to touch the camera to activate the shutter.  Until I learned how to use it, every single pottery photo I took was ever-so-slightly out of focus. You can get them on Ebay for a couple hundred dollars. After destroying two of the cheapest available tripods in a few months just through ordinary use, I finally, just today, went the next step up: $3 more. (I told you I am cheap, didn't I?) This one is so much better! The legs adjust infinitely and it has a teeny-tiny bubble level under the camera, so you can make sure you are shooting, well, level. 

I spent the entire sunlit part of the day shooting today, formal shots and a few in-use, which always look contrived to me, but they are kind of fun to set up. Here are a few of my results:

Finally A Firing!!

For real this time! And, yes, I did fire both kilns at the same time. It got only slightly hairy when it came time to put them into body reduction, as the kilns are located about a quarter mile away from each other, so I was jogging back and forth to watch each spyhole. One kiln is significantly tighter and faster than the other, though, so it was out of body reduction while I was still watching 012 in the other. 

I was blessed with a warm sunny day (in December! in Maine!) but you can see from the photo that the outdoor kiln needed to shed a lot of water due to our recent heavy rains. 

We are leaving town today to visit the in-laws, so i won't be unloading these until Sunday; both firings seemed picture-perfect, so I can hardly stand the wait!

I also had time to take a lot of photos, and, as anyone who has been there knows, Watershed is loaded with interesting subjects. I'm posting those, one a day, at my other blog, if you are interested. 

And Now for Something

...completely different. 

I did something quite out of character today. While tethering my dog behind a convenience store, I noticed a vignette that struck me. A beautiful vine dotted with brilliant red berries and golden fall foliage climbed around a prosaically dull meter in a corner where some graffiti had sprouted. Something about it twanged the same twanger that I sometimes feel looking at thrown and altered work; something about the tension between the contrasts of organic and mechanical.  

Normally I would have made a mental note of it, taken a moment to enjoy it, and gone on with my day. But lately I have been playing with my husband's camera, for more than just pottery shots. I wouldn't call myself a photographer, but sometimes I point the camera at things and press the button. I felt a little silly (in a classic Yankee who-do-you-think-you-are kind of way) but I let Doug's example inspire me: he would never feel like he had to explain why an image was important to him, nor let errands get in the way of a creative moment; much less worry that the Big Apple clerks would think he was weird. 

So I went back to the house and got the camera and took a few shots. This one is the best. I am pleased not just with the photo, but with myself for honoring creativity wherever it presents itself.