Product Shots - pottery blog

As I said in my last post, I'd post details about what I've been working on and let you see the results of the product shots.

Mansour Eskandary

Mansour—Mans for short—is a well known potter, based just outside of Plymouth. He's had a blog for a while but was waiting until he could offer his work for sale there before developing it.

I've been helping him with that, working out a scheme to use the blog for that purpose, as well as the more normal uses. I've also been doing the product shots, as I spoke about in my last post.

Have a look at his blog, there's only two products for sale so far. But now that we've broken the back of the approach, it shouldn't take long to upload the product shots and do the blurb for the rest of this batch of 24.

By the way, the "scheme" I'm on about is the way we've decided to use labels very carefully so that we could use a simple list of links at the top to allow visitors to quickly see, for example, all the sold work, or all the raku, etc. We also spent a lot of time coming up with a convention to name each product.

I think we need one more column of links to cover

• normal posts (all will be labelled "journal" or something like it)
• terms and conditions
• the privacy policy
  

Did I leave any out? Anyway, what did you think of the product shots?



comments / feedback always welcome :)

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Kiln / furnace shot

This is a shot I overlooked from the pottery shoot the other day. Three pots are in the kiln (furnace) and are about to come out. This is their second and final firing.
The slip-resist coating on the one at the back right can be seen (drips / bumps around the rim).

They are all destined for finishing in a reducing (oxygen-starved) atmosphere. See previous posts for more details.

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Second pot shot out of the digital darkroom

Pot number two out of the digital darkroom from the shoot at the potter's workshop. Again, as part of this glazing process, the pot is placed on a bed of wood shavings prior to sealing it all with an upturned metal bin.

This will allow the pot, glaze, smoke and reducing atmosphere to work their magic...

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The pot firing shoot, part 1

This is the first one from Wednesday's photo shoot. The pot had just come out of the kiln and had been placed on a bed of wood shavings.



For the type of glaze being used, a reducing and carbon-rich atmosphere is needed. The heat from the pot ignites the shavings and an upturned metal dustbin over the pot seals everything in.

The free oxygen is quickly used up by the burning wood (hence the term "reducing"), producing mainly carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and free vaporised carbon, and this is the atmospheric mix in which the magic of the glaze occurs.

Of course, many, many other factors go towards the nature of the finish, for example using a slip as part of the process, like here. Look closely at the front surface of the pot, and you can see some of it peeling away and down.

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Hmmm... got my arm twisted again :)

Well, regular readers and people who know my work will know I don't really do colour, and I don't usually do commissions.

...and those who know me real well will also know that I'm a firm believer in the axiom that the only reason that rules exist is so you think about it a bit before you break them.

So that took me to a potter's garage-studio yesterday to get some shots for his blog.

Trying circumstances... my camera kit all now smells of the smoke from the reducing wood shavings used.

So today I'm pulling the shots I got into the digital darkroom to see what I've got and to whittle them down to the one or two for his blog.

More later...

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