Pottery, Photography, Design - Brandon "Fuzzy" Schwartz
A few weeks ago Schwartz Photography traveled down the road to the baseball fields to take some team photos of two local Little League teams. Everything went pretty smoothly and the photos turned out pretty well. Here are a few of the shots:
We had a good time and hope that this could be another area of photography to explore.
Well, back to the real world tomorrow… Spring Break is over but I feel like I accomplished a few things. I spent a lot of time in the clay studio, worked on the new site, and did some yard work.
wheel thrown stoneware
Here is a look at the drying shelf in the clay studio. I threw a number of pieces in the last week, mostly mugs and bowls. I used three different kinds of stoneware over the last few days and I’m excited to see what the two new clays do when they are fired and glazed. I feel like I’m making some small improvements with my wheel throwing technique. For one thing, I’m getting more efficient. I also feel like I’m better at pulling handles than I was a year ago. A couple things that I hope to work on next might include lids and throwing some larger forms. I can’t wait to bisque fire and then try some of the new glazes I got.
I also worked on my new side project. There is a new feed on Potterymakinginfo.com called the working artists feed. It produces the most recent posts from the blogs of ceramic artists and potters.
A while ago I started a little side project using Google sites and Google Custom Search. It was a tool to find pottery making information easier. It seemed to go pretty well so I decided to polish it up a bit and add a few new ideas. Now you can see a brand new pottery and ceramics site with some new tools at Pottery Making Info. Now it offers search engines, pottery feeds and a brand new design. There are some other ideas and features in the works but since it’s only a side project the going might be slow. For now it’s a place for me to learn more about how websites work and add interesting pottery resources as I find them. Some day I hope it might be a rather useful site for potters and ceramic artists.
I have a few photos of hunting dogs on display out there on the world wide web. Boberosa Gun Dogs just launched a spectacular new site and many of the photos that are currently scattered throughout the site were taken by “Schwartz Photography”. Hopefully I’ll be able to take some more photos for them in the future.
During Christmas Break I was trying to finish throwing a few items on the wheel, then bisque fire, glaze, and then glaze fire everything in about a week. Though I had no team of pointy-eared short people dressed in red and green, I got everything finished up in time for Christmas. I think I glazed the whole load in about a day and a half. Still using the dip-the-brush-in-the-glaze-and-paint-the-glaze-onto-the-bisqueware method which is ridiculously slow but didn’t seem quite as tedious this time. Probably because the glaze thickness on each piece was directly proportional to my patience and time left before Christmas. As in “I made some of the glaze really thin to save time.” This resulted in some of the pieces having a different result than I had gotten before. Some had different colors and some were just a less glossy finish. Most of them turned out okay, just a little different than expected but a few I want to re-glaze or re-fire. Below you can see some of the finished pieces I pulled out of the last load.
I gave away a lot of these pieces, especially the mugs, as Christmas gifts. I also gave away a few items from the last load that I fired. I got some positive feedback and haven’t heard of any handles falling off or mugs shattering.
As I was shooting the photos of these pots I experimented with a Circular Polarizer filter. It was a cheap filter but it was interesting to find out how much I could control the reflection. On some of the bigger items I took two photos with different Polarizer settings and then combined them in Photoshop to get a pretty good result. Now I just need to upgrade my gray Walmart fabric to a gradient backdrop so the wrinkles won’t show up behind the pots in the photos.