Photo Woes

So, I was all excited yesterday because I finally bought a new digital camera. Mine died at the beginning of February, and I've been hemming and hawing over what kind to buy. So I finally went out yesterday, armed with my research, to test drive a few in person and settled on a Canon PowerShot SX10is, which is an EVF or "bridge" camera, meaning it's sort of halfway between a point-and-shoot and a digital SLR camera.

I got the thing home and started taking photos, of my pets, my husband, things around the house. And the photos looked great. Then I took it down to my studio, where I had some new pots to photograph. Here's the first studio shot:


Pretty nice huh? Not too shabby at all. Here's the next shot:




Great! No problems whatsoever. Here's the next one:



What the..?! And thus a good day spiraled into a bad afternoon.

I absolutely could NOT get the camera to focus on this pot. Hadn't changed any settings or anything at all. I tried repeatedly, but I could not get a focused shot of this pot or the green celadon one shown in the first photo.

So then I started changing every single setting, poring over the manual, trying to figure out what was going on. I got so frustrated that I had to leave the studio, or I thought I might throw the camera at the wall. Why would a brand-new, highly advanced, expensive Canon camera not be able to take the same shots that my crappy old Canon point-and-shoot took just fine?!

I think for some reason, the camera can't find the light-colored pots to focus on, like maybe it can't distinguish them from the background. I don't know what I'm going to do here. I think there must be some way to make it work, short of returning the camera and trying a different model, which will get expensive quickly, given the 15% restocking fee charged everywhere on camera returns. If you have any ideas or advice, please leave me some comments! Here's a shot of my photo setup, in case you were wondering how I've got things set up. I need help!

NCECA Recap

Well, I'm back from my weekend at NCECA in sunny Phoenix. Yesterday was my 29th birthday, and the trip was a gift to myself to celebrate the start of my last year in my twenties.

This was my first NCECA and I had no idea what to expect. Because the conference is kind of expensive, I just purchased a day pass to go on Thursday. I had the opportunity to watch some demonstrations, go to a few panel discussions, and explore the annual cup show and sale and the K-12 exhibition (which was very cool).

So the conference was pretty cool, but the real fun started when I ventured out of the convention center. A number of concurrent exhibitions are held alongside NCECA, so I had the opportunity to look at a lot of people's work in one weekend. My favorite discoveries were the Artstream Nomadic Gallery show (where I snapped up a beautiful Jen Allen mug), and the "La Mesa" show put on by Santa Fe Clay, which featured 150 place settings by 150 different artists. After the other hands-off, pots-on-pedestals exhibits, it was such a joy to be able to handle and examine the work of so many talented artists. Here's a few you might recognize:

This is Lisa Orr's place setting. Lisa Orr produces work that is sort of the direct opposite of the aesthetic of my work, but I just love her vibrancy and the depth of her surfaces. More is more indeed.


Here's Bonnie Seeman, senior lecturer at the University of Miami, and the creator of some amazingly intricate and detailed work. Do you see the tiny bugs all over the cups?


And here's Christa Assad's place setting. I love the fresh feel of her work and the bright and somewhat unusual colors.


All in all, I had a fabulous time. Next year's NCECA is in Philadephia, which is a great, great town. Maybe I'll just have to attend that one too...

NCECA

I'm flying off to Phoenix tomorrow to attend the NCECA conference. I'm so excited! NCECA is like the clay arts Mecca, and I've never been. I'll tell you all about the trip when I get back!

A refusal to learn

Do you have a lesson in your life that you are repeatedly trying to learn? I do. The lesson that I need to learn over and over again is that I cannot glaze a kiln's worth of pots and do a bunch of glaze testing in one day. Ever since I installed my own kiln, I have been struggling to learn this.

It normally takes me about four weeks to make enough work to fill up my kiln for a bisque, because I only work about 10 to 15 hours a week in my studio. I then try to glaze all those pieces in one or two days. And every single time, this sounds like more than enough time, but nearly every time, I'm struggling to get it done. And I'm usually under some kind of deadline for custom orders or class assignments, so I can't just push the schedule back and glaze another day.

I don't know why I do this over and over. I did it again just this week. I have a surface treatment assignment due on Monday, so I plan to fire a glaze kiln Friday night into Saturday morning. I should have probably fired a bisque around March 13th in order to give myself plenty of time to glaze and mix some new glaze tests, but as usual, I didn't. I ran the bisque last Friday, and now have just one day to glaze everything. Why do I do this to myself?!

Positivity

I signed into Etsy this morning, and saw I had a new feedback comment. I clicked the link and here's what I saw:

"This seller was amazing! The earrings I bought for my girlfriend were high quality, and Michelle shipped them fast. I would definitely order from this seller again."

Feedback comments like this mean so much to me. Given the relative anonymity of the Internet, it's very easy to forget that you're still dealing with real people. When someone takes the time to tell me that they enjoyed our brief interaction, my heart gives a little leap. I try hard to make each transaction a nice experience, and I love knowing that this is being noticed. I've been fortunate in that I've had very few bad transactions on Etsy. The vast majority of my customers have been fabulous, and for that, I'm so grateful. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

A weekend with a master

It's Monday morning and I'm recovering from a two-day weekend workshop with the legendary ceramic artist Don Reitz. I love these weekend workshops at ACC, I've attended four or five now and they're always wonderful. Very often, I come away from them with ideas for new pots, and loads of information on tools and techniques. There's nothing like getting to sit and watch the way these brilliant artists work.

The Don Reitz workshop was a little different than all the others though. I didn't leave yesterday afternoon with a sketchbook full of new ideas and techniques to try. In fact, I didn't take hardly any notes at all. Instead, I was swept up in Don's immeasurable enthusiasm and passion for clay, and for its incredible qualities. Don and I make very different pots, and he's got forty years of pot-making on me, but I saw in him that passion that I feel in my heart for clay and the creative process.

My teacher Kathy specifically wanted me to attend this workshop so that I would be exposed to Don's confident mark-making abilities, his tendency to attack the clay surface with gusto and fervor. Using a variety of tools and his own bare hands, Don carved up his thrown sections, making slashes, crosses, indentations, tearing edges, and so on. I have been wanting to shake up the direction of my work, but I've found that I'm often scared of ruining an otherwise good pot with what I think will be bad marks or alterations. As a result, I make the same pots again and again, and they're not bad, but eventually I lose a bit of that passionate creative flame that drives an artist in the first place. Nothing kills the creative spirit like boredom, I guess.

Don is in his eighties, and he had not been to Colorado for a workshop since 1987, so it's unlikely that I will ever have the opportunity to be in his presence again. I'm so glad that I had the chance to spend a weekend with him, even as just a spectator, sitting in a plastic chair with fifty or so other clay fiends. I take away from this weekend my new mantra, Don's voice in my head saying what he said over and over as he feverishly played in the clay and tried whatever came to mind, "It's ok though. It'll all work out."

Testing...testing...

My camera is on its last legs, so I haven't really been able to do any posts about what I'm working on in the studio these days. Mostly, I've been doing my required assignments for my ceramics IV class and making a lot of test tiles for an upcoming surface treatment assignment. Here are some really crappy photos from my cell phone of my newest test tile-making method:

First, I roll out of slab of clay and cut it to be 10 inches long and 4 inches wide. Then I texture half of it with a bisque stamp (mine is a sort of pebbly pattern). To get that angled test tile shape, I then drape the long clay slab over the flap of a cardboard clay box, adjusting the flap inside the box to get the right angle.


After the slab has stiffened up a bit, I cut it into 2" tiles with a wire knife, and then use a hole cutter to put a hole in the corner of each tile. I also score a line into the inside bend of the tile, to make it easier to break off the unglazed base of the test tile after firing.


This leaves me with little square test tiles that can be hung up on nails or tied together into sets. I use a weird self-created shorthand to record the glaze information on the base of the test tile before firing using an underglaze marker, and then write the information again in Sharpie on the back of the finished tile. Once some of these are out of the kiln, I'll post a photo of a finished one. Hopefully all of my testing will yield some cool new colors and surfaces!