Online Tools for Making Pottery and Ceramic Art

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.

Photos on Display

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.

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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.

I guess another year has come to an end.  Looking back I had a pretty good 2009, especially the last week.  My wife and I went up to Michigan to spend some time with my family during Christmas.  My brother and his wife were home from China so it was great to spend some time with them.  They made it back safely to China but apparently their sleeping routines are a little off.  I guess that happens when you fly half way around the world…

HP pavilion elite 9290f

Not long ago I bought myself a late birthday/early Christmas present.  My old hp pavilion (probably 6 or 7 years old) needed an upgrade.  It served me well and I never really had any major problems with it until I crammed it so full of programs and files at the end that it really started to slow down.  So I shopped around and decided to go with another hp.  Since I plan to have it for awhile I decided to go all out and I got the Pavilion Elite 9290f while it was on sale.  So far it has been awesome.  It came with Windows 7 which seems to be pretty smooth.  Plus I got a copy of Adobe CS4 and MS Office at a great price because I’m a student at IUSB.  Everything has run really well so far.  I can’t believe how much faster everything is compared to my old computer. I’m actually typing this post on the new computer.  It’s set up in the “command center” at the moment (also known as the living room where I have two computers, an LCD monitor, Wii, Xbox 360, and TV all set up and ready to take over the world.)

dell 2209wa

The desktop didn’t come with a monitor so after getting some cash and gift cards for Christmas I talked to the fine people at Dell and they offered me a great sale price on their IPS panel 2209wa  monitor.  Apparently it is a pretty decent monitor for photo editing without a huge price tag.

Now, as Christmas break draws to a close, I’m going to try to get all the computers and the new wireless printer we got at Sam’s Club to connect to each other through the magic of a wireless network.

A couple weeks ago I was hired by a friend to do some photography for his business.  He and his dad train dogs and run a kennel in Albion, IN called Boberosa Gun Dogs.  They wanted some pictures of their dogs and kennel to use for the new website that they are having designed.  So I had to get up early on a Saturday morning but it was worth it.  The lighting was awesome and I got a lot of good shots (as far as I can tell).  I don’t really know much about hunting or training dogs but they said that I got some good photos.  It was pretty cool and I learned a lot.  And they said I might be able to do it again.  If it works out right I might take some photos of dogs on a regular basis for their clients.  Here are a few of the photos I like:

Every now and then I get asked to take some photos at an event that our church puts on.  About the first week of December Crossroads had their Christmas music program.  There was a lot of good music and the kids put on a good show and I took a few photos of all the action.  They wanted mostly photos of people coming in and a few of the band but the shots of the band are more exciting so take a look at those:

Even though we learned a lot by taking pictures of a baby it was nice to get back to a family with kids that wouldn’t start crying every few minutes.  We photographed this family at Bonneyville Mill park on an overcast day in October.  Here is a small sample of the photos that we ended up with:

They were a great family to work with.  They were a lot of fun and we got a bunch of great shots.  We got some good individual photos of each kid and some good shots with all three kids… I should have put up more but I had a hard time deciding.  Now I know how they feel when they say that they are having a tough time deciding which they like.  At least they aren’t saying that they don’t like any of them…

In October my wife and I were asked by some friends to take some photos of their son.  Though we didn’t have any experience (or idea about) taking photos of very young children we decided to give it a try.  We spent most of the time at the park and also took a few at Fashion Farm and a couple at their house.  It was a little cold so the poor kid probably didn’t want to be out there.  He wasn’t extremely cooperative but we still got a few good shots of him and the whole family.  Check out a few of the photos below:

Let the mass update begin…  (stay tuned for a steady stream of updates about what I’ve kept myself busy with the last few months.)

I was asked to do a shirt design for the West Noble Cross Country Invitational a few months back.  I can’t take credit for the color choice.  I designed it in black and white and then the fine folks at Shepherd’s Shirt Shack did the hard part – choosing a color and printing the shirts.  I didn’t get to take a picture of an actual shirt so the picture below is the black and white file turned color.  In fact those might not even be the right colors but it should be close enough to give you the right idea…

Shirt design for the 2009 West Noble Invitational

Happy Thanksgiving!

I decided to finally put up some pictures of the ceramic ware that I finished a couple months ago.  (See the bisque fired pots).  I got around to taking some photos a week or two ago using my homemade photo studio.  I shot everything really quick so some of the pictures aren’t exactly outstanding….  But on with the show!

I have lofty hopes of giving some sort of recap on the past few months in which I have been doing almost everything except updating the blog….  Maybe by Christmas.