Hi, my name is Tanya Bechara & I'm a potter & ceramic artist in Sydney, Australia. Welcome to my very first blog. I've been dragged kicking & screaming into the 21st century so please bear with me while I find my feet in this world of technology. My inspiration to start this blog comes from the many wonderful artists I've met on Twitter recently who kindly share their experiences, ideas, trials & triumphs & so I will endeavour to do the same & hopefully find something worth contributing to the world of Blog. Over the past few days I decided to try to find another way of taking photos of my pottery. Previously, I have been using an old projector screen as a backdrop & using natural light (not a good thing on a bright sunny day). Usually the glare obliterated a lot of details & washed out the colours & the reflections showed lovely details of either my head, my backyard & even the neighbours house <insert sarcastic tone here>! Not features I want to show off on the glossy surfaces of my work I can assure you. And of course using a flash is a waste of time as we all know. So I followed some links to other blogs that had been suggested recently & though there were some helpful tips, I found most of it hard to follow as I know very little about cameras & all those settings! The only settings I understand on my digital camera are the "mountains" for long shots & the "flowers" for close ups and how to turn the flash on and off. That's it. So I knew I was in trouble when I read an entire blog & by the end of it still didnt understand what to do. My next step was to 'google' of course (I'm always saying "Thank God for Google"). It lead to YouTube (as most google searches do) & there were a couple of easy, basic set ups, using whatever is on hand. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zARqGgHjNc this youtube link I found the most instructive & easiest to understand. I find it easier to learn how to do things by seeing it done & putting it to practice rather than reading instructions (or as i commonly call them "destructions"). So here are some photos of my set up.   Using an old projector screen hanging from a stand at my kitchen table then draped over the table, I then used a heat lamp (brightest light i could find at home), 2 broomsticks formed a frame for me to hang some muslin fabric (to defuse light) in front of heatlamp/spotlight (but not too close so as to cause a fire, also turned off the lamp while not actually taking photos so as to reduce heat). I used 2 large pieces of white foam & foil wrapped around some cardboard as light reflectors and placed these at adjustable positions on the opposite side to the lamp. Now since I dont own a tripod I used a small foot stool with non-skid dots on top & on base which helped me hold the camera as still as possible & at the right height. I still had some blurry photos, I didnt follow every step exactly & had to be a bit imaginative with the equipment to duplicate the set up seen in the Youtube video to get close to the desired effect. Here are some photos of my results, first with a flash only, then next with a spot light only then with the defused light and reflecting surfaces on opposite side.   "flash only" "spot light only"  "defused light with foam & foil reflectors" Also, here are some other photos taken with a black background (the back of my projector screen) with and without defused light. The difference in the shadows amazed me.  
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Monday 25 July 2011
Photographing pottery & ceramics when you dont know how.
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