My mom's been asking me if I could take professional pictures of her and her studio's pottery for a while now, and I've been a bad daughter and putting it off. Part of me wanted proper lighting equipment to do it with (but with what money you might ask?) and another part of me knew I wouldn't be happy with it if I didn't spend at least an entire day fussing.
I've photographed pottery before, but in a legit studio with wonderous giant lightboxes attached to the ceiling, multiple strobes and Dan, the magical darkroom man at Sac State if anything went wrong. So being faced with a garage, a normal assortment of garage tools, and a few cheap clamp hotlights made my palms sweat. Not to mention my 40D is having a mid-life crisis where it forgets how to use its own shutter, so my only reliable piece of equipment is my beautiful manfrotto tripod.
Fortunately, my family proved eager assistants, and we rigged construction lights to ladders, fed cables throughout the garage, and propped up a large piece of white plastic opaque sheeting I had bought for just this purpose a few months ago (proof of procrastination). After changing the entire setup twice, I found a good setup while squatting on a stool, propping a flag on my knee with a clamped light on the top, pushing the shutter with one hand and diffusing the light with a piece of who knows what plastic covering while my mom diffused the overhead light with another piece of plastic sheeting.
Overall I'm not completely dissatisfied with the turnout. Could I have done better with a proper lighting setup? Most definitely. My shadows would be more diffused and in different places, it wouldn't have taken me ten minutes per picture to mess with the crazy yellow color those construction lights put out, and with a bigger table I could have gotten more interesting angles.
But under the conditions, I consider myself pretty badass.
A special thanks to Brynn, Tim, and Christopher for dealing with me during the shoot, and to the potters of the Elmwood Street Studio in Pleasanton, California (Marty, Kate, and Marilyn) for letting me photograph their work.
