Handmade Pottery + Ceramic Jewelry

I hope everyone here in the US enjoyed their Thanksgiving celebrations!  I certainly did and took the opportunity to take a mini-blog break at the same time.  This post is inspired by my role as shop critique thread starter for the Etsy Mud Team, which I recently revived after a bit of an absence.

Shop critiques are usually scheduled for 3 shops at a time and are voluntary for folks who want a constructive critique of their shop.  Most often, photographing ceramic work is where most sellers need improvement.  Let’s face it, taking photographs is tough and it’s not just about clicking the shutter and uploading the image to a computer – though it certainly is easier with digital photography than film.  It is even trickier when it comes to photographing work that one hopes to sell online where the listing description and photos are all that the buyer has to go by in order to make a purchase decision.

There are a multitude of options for taking product shots and I am only showing but one – using an inexpensive homemade light box inspired by Strobist Blog which uses clamp lights, light bulbs, piece of seamless white drawing paper cut to size to fit in box, and a simple prop.

Total upfront cost if you have to purchase everything new =  $39.50.  Chances are that you already have many of these items on hand and your cost will be < $5.00.

Supplies:

• $14.00/2 energy saving 100 watt compact fluorescent light bulbs
• $24.00/2 clamp lights with aluminum reflectors
• $1.00/drawing paper cut to size
• < .50/trace paper cut to size – I have rolls of trace paper from landscape arch school that I used, though it’s also sold in pads
• free recycled box
• and a bit of tape

Tools needed:

• scissors
• box cutter or X-Acto knife
• ruler
• pencil and eraser
• scrap cardboard or self healing cutting mat

I set up my light box one morning on my kitchen counter before it was even light outside and began the process of photographing some ceramic jewelry to list for sale in my Etsy shop.  Etsy allows 5 slots for photographs per listing and I encourage people to use all 5 slots since it’s tricky selling items online when a buyer can’t touch or see an item in person.  Ideally, each photograph will offer something new – whole piece, detail shots, different angles, and I always like to offer the flip side of a piece of jewelry or the foot of one of my pots (some might not think it’s important, but I like seeing what the foot looks like before I buy something – I want to know if it has one?, or does it have a wiggle wire bottom?, or whether it is just flat?).

Before diving into the Photoshop tutorial, I would like to point out that there are a number of free photo editing programs out there – I just happen to have Photoshop CS2 loaded on my computer and this is what I am comfortable using.  Just google free photo editing software programs and lots of web based and downloadable program links will pop up.

I would also like to credit Lisa Lapella who wrote a tutorial on her blog that alerted me to the use of the Photoshop “curve” tool.

I also want to mention that I’m using an older Olympus C-7070 digital camera and I am becoming more familiar with the settings of my camera.  The settings that are very important for photographing small items are the macro buttons (which are often depicted by flower symbols), ISO (affects amount of light coming through aperture), and white balance (there are often presets such as day, night, florescent, outside, etc.) – though I am still learning my camera’s settings.  In the meantime, I’ve been able to correct some of my photographic shortcomings by using Photoshop.

So, let’s get started!  As you can see, after taking the photograph of my pendant in the light box and opening it in Photoshop, it has a gray cast to the image.  I want to lighten this up a bit so it doesn’t look so washed out and really make it pop off the computer screen.

Note: I used a bit of wet clay to prop the pendant up in the light box – an alternative is using pliable wax or poster putty.

Type “Ctrl + M” to open the curve tool – I am used to using keyboard short cuts to save time when I edit 100+ photos in a sitting.  To do it the long way, simply click on “image” from the top bar, then “adjustments”, then “curves” to do the same thing.  You can either click and drag on the line in the curves tool box to adjust brightness and contrast, or click on the white eye dropper bottom right and then select a space on the photograph to adjust.  It might take some playing around to get a good likeness without distorting the color of the item you’re photographing.

When I’m happy with the way it looks, I simply hit the “enter” key on my keyboard.  Note: if your image gets out of control and is no longer representative of your item, just click cancel and start over.  You can use the undo key, but it only goes back 1 action.  Or, click and drag the last action from the “history” box that you want to undo into the little trash can icon – though this will affect all actions that follow the one you want to delete.

Next, I will crop my image because Etsy uses a square shaped as thumb nails and photos of items for sale.  The crop tool is on the left hand side of the Photoshop workspace. Or type “Ctrl + C” for the crop tool short cut.

You can set up tool preset for frequently used tools.  I have 3 tool presets set – square, another rectangular shaped one for Etsy that I use when my photo is not easily resized to square shape if I haven’t left enough space around my item, and one for Trunkt that has very specific & odd pixel dimension requirements (300 x 311px).

In the case of this pendant, I select the “square” crop tool preset.  As an alternate to using a tool preset, is to hold the “shift” key while dragging the crop button to constrain the cropping to a square shape.

Once the crop tool is selected, I simply place the tool on a section of my image and then drag the crop tool to the opposite corner.  Once I have the basic size and composition set, I can move the area to be cropped by selecting the move tool which has an arrow and a little cross type thing next to it in the left hand tool box.  I can then move the square area I’ve selected around as desired.  When I’m happy with the photo and it looks good to me, I hit “enter” on the keyboard to crop the image.  If I don’t like the way I cropped the image, I select “edit” from the top bar on my screen and then “undo” or I can type “Ctrl + Z” for the short cut.

Note: While I eyeball my photos to see what looks right, you can get very specific and enable the grid and ruler for precision.  Go to “view” on top bar, then click on “ruler” to enable ruler, and “show” – then “grid”.

When I take photos of my work, I always take them in “High Quality” setting which is labeled HQ on my camera – though, I can take them as a RAW, TIFF or SHQ which are higher quality and much larger files than HQ.  For online work, HQ is plenty big.  I can also take them at a lower resolution by selecting the appropriate resolution from my camera’s menu screen.

To see what size my newly cropped image is, I type “Ctrl + Alt + I” to open the image size box.  I can also click on “image”  on top bar, then “image size” to open the dialog box.

For the web, 72 dpi is sufficient and Etsy, specifies images no larger than 1000 px in any single dimension.  I normally default to 800 px and always have.  It’s plenty big and if printed represents 11.11″.  Obviously if I were submitting images for a juried show, book or magazine submission, I would use a higher resolution based on guidelines provided.

Once I’ve entered the resolution and pixel dimensions, I hit “enter” on keyboard or “ok” in the dialog box.

Once, I’ve made the image smaller, I have to save it to my computer so that I can upload the new image to my Etsy shop.

I type in “Ctrl + S” to save the image to my computer.  Note: this affects the original photo file that I have uploaded to my computer.  If I wish to preserve the original file for later use, I can type “Ctrl + Shift + S” (or click on “file” – “save as”) to save as a different file name.  I will now have 2 images of same shot on my computer – the original and the newly altered one.  Sometimes this is good if I want to upload the same photo to different sites or to keep the original files away for future use or posterity.

Rinse, wash and repeat for each photo. Believe it or not, I can cruise through 100 or more photos in a about an hour.  The hard part is taking them.

It’s really important to have a filing system for photographs – I stress this because I have been a lax filer, and have lost images, altered originals, can’t find image I need when I want it fast, etc. etc.  For work like my inexpensive ceramic jewelry piece, this isn’t so critical, but for one off ceramic pieces that I no longer own, it’s a problem.

My final listing can be seen here: http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=17845165. Notice, I’ve added a prop to one of my photos just for contrast.

I do prefer using a graduated dark charcoal gray to white photo backdrop for photographing pottery, although some people have been successful creating a catalog type product photo set up.  It just depends on the venue and audience.  I have found that using a graduated backdrop (like the one above) also eliminates the need to adjust photos, other than cropping and image size adjustment, in most cases.

In pinch, for less than $2.00 for the cost of paper, the make do set up above would work a lot better as a photo backdrop than many of the photographs I see on Etsy.  Simply place a large piece of paper on a table or other item against a wall and photograph outside on an overcast day or at dawn or dusk to eliminate nasty direct sunshine glare.  Different colored drawing paper would also work as a backdrop including black, gray, and something that would contrast well with the work while remaining neutral.

Have a great week,

~Cynthia