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Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Photographing your pottery

Here's some helpful information on photographing your pottery from Dmichael Coffee, along with photos of his setup. Here's the link:

]https://dmichaelcoffee.wordpress.com/2011/07/12/shots-of-pots-on-the-cheap-and-low-tech/

Several years ago I took a workshop on photographing ones work given by Joy Tanner and John Britt at his studio, and learned how to make my own light box, reflector cards, etc. It was a huge help.

These days I'm working hard at creating a vegetable garden and a flower garden at my new residence here in Ashland, Oregon. I'm still trying to deal with too much stuff, but hopefully by summer I'll have the heaviest of garden work finished, and be ready to sort and get rid of a lot of it. I've hand dug and made 7 raised beds so far, planted or transplanted about 50 strawberry plants, herbs, winter veggies, and now working on digging trenches to plant the rest of the asparagus. I've also planted several raspberries, transplanted a couple of blueberry plants, two grape vines and a couple of climbing roses for the arbor that leads into my secret vegetable garden.

All the beds are planted and I'm going to have to figure out where to put my bean pole and find a space to plant potatoes, the artichoke seedlings that are under a grow lamp in the kitchen, as well as onions, leek and squash.

The flower bed in the garden area right behind the house is almost fully planted with perennials now and I think there's only room now for some warm weather bedding plants. In fact, I should probably think about starting some cosmos in the house now.

The basement where my wheel, pug mill and shelving are stored, waiting I had hoped, to become something resembling a studio, is a dark, dank, cold, damp mess! A couple of weeks ago I went down there looking for a needle nose pliers among my jewelry tools and found a box of very rusted tools. Not fun! So now I'm waiting for delivery of a dehumidifier to set up and lessen the damage. Once the weather warms and the heavy garden work is done, I'll be spending time down there with a lot of rust remover!

I'm going to sell my little used larger cone 10 digital electric kiln that was only fired about a dozen times, mostly to bisque pots for a few firings of my large soda kiln, and the small Olympic gas kiln that I only used twice to re-fire some soda pots and some slip and glaze tests, and my big electric slab roller that's only had about an hour of use as a slab roller over the years and used only as a work table. It's too big to get into the basement, and even if it could fit, there's no room for it!  I might be able to find someone with similar but smaller slab roller and smaller electric kiln of the same model that I can do a trade with. I just don't have the space for them and I need to clear the garage and the work shop next to the garage, so I can get my car in there by summer.

If I can clear that garage workshop section, I may just move my wheel in there. There a spigot in the basement but not drainage and it would be expensive to put in a drain system that pulls the water up and out. For the little bit of work I'd be doing in the future, and that's if I decided to make pots again, I figure I can just bring some water into the barn area.

We have a place in town where you can rent studio space and get pots fired, so I will be exploring that this summer. I'm thinking I  can throw and bisque pots in a small electric kiln at home, and bring pots there to glaze and fire.

Well that's it for now. Time for my yogurt and blueberry breakfast, then on to paperwork and getting some tax papers ready for the meeting with the accountant in a few days.