A couple of days ago I was asked, by a friend, to take some photos of her ceramics for an entry she wanted to make.  It is a strange thing when you are photographing something like this.  You have to use all your photography skills and your knowledge of lighting and stuff, but the end result has to be that the ceramic piece needs to be the star and the photography has to take a back seat.

These images are purely documentary.  If the pieces were mine, I might try to be more creative, but when you get paid to do a job like this, you have to do what the client wants.  So I was asked to take photos of the pieces.

The artist is my friend Lene Jakobsen, a Danish ceramic artist living in Melbourne.  She has a website and you can visit it here.  If you would like to look at Lene’s work, she will be at the Ivanhoe Makers market tomorrow, Saturday, at the Livingston Community Centre, 1 Livingstone Street, Ivanhoe, from 10am to 4pm.

This is one of her vases.  It is very hard to photograph, especially with the very shiny glaze on it.  It reflected everything in the room.  I need to find a way to stop the reflections, if it is possible.  I tried to photoshop some of them out, but it was impossible to do them all without ruining the vase, so I left some, but tried to make sure you couldn’t really tell what the reflections were.

This vase has a mat glaze, but it presented with other problems, it is hard to photograph because of the colour.  It was turning out pink, which this clay does.  I remember using it once and it comes out with a pink tinge.  I used curves to help keep the pink tinge down.

I love the dots on the work, the dots also make it very tactile and if you are like me, like to touch things, then you would love touching this stuff.  One of the things I don’t like about museums and galleries, can’t touch anything.  I know why you can’t, but still, it is great when you can.

I don’t normally show images like this, but I thought it would be interesting to explore photographing something where your technical expertise is necessary, but not your creativity.  I used a very old studio light I had, that my external flash set off.  I used the external flash remotely and it was one of the lights that I used to photograph the ceramic pieces.

I was happy with the work, but I suppose as I do more, I will learn more.  I might need to see about getting a professional, more up to date studio light, so I can do it more professionally.  Though, hard to do when no one seems to need me to do any work for them.  Perhaps with time I will get more jobs and can justify spending the money.  I don’t know how people do it, but trying to make money from photography seems to be an impossible task.  Time.