It’s that special time of year again.  We get to celebrate the birth of a very special person…  My wife!!!

But more importantly, I have made a small addition to my growing website.  The first gallery is up!  The clay dinnerware set that I created in college is featured on the Clay page of artbyfuzzy.com.  (Of course you should check out the actual gallery but just in case it doesn’t work there is a screenshot to the left.)  I still have some tweaking to do but I’m happy with the basic design.  Some day I’d like to get information for each piece added and maybe change a few small details.  Let me know what you think.  And of course I’ll be working all of Christmas vacation to get the rest of the galleries up….

I also had to manually fix the links to the News page (you are here) because I somehow screwed that up again.  But now everything seems to be working okay.  The other good news is that I got an FTP program to work from my flash drive so I didn’t have to manually upload the files to the server.  I used WS FTP LE which was created by Ipswitch.  I think they have a newer version out now… Since we’re talking about software I should mention that the web gallery was created using Jalbum and the Fotoplayer2 skin.  Both a great holiday bargain at $0.

 Well, I’m on Christmas break so this could be my last post of the year.  Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and check back next year for some more spectacular updates.  I’ve got big plans for 2007…

Somehow December started and I didn’t even realize it.  I guess I need a vacation…  Maybe I was working too hard this past weekend.  My goal was to get some decent pictures of my pit fired pieces that could be used for my website.  If you’ve been residing under a rock or you weren’t paying attention my site has been updated.  (Read the entry before this one to get the details.)  I’m more of a beginner than an expert when it comes to photography so I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing. 

Saturday morning I started to set up a home-made photo studio in the corner of our apartment.  I used the cheap clamp lights with those daylight flourescent bulbs that are supposed to save money on your electric bill.  I found enough stuff to clamp them to and set down a gray piece of fabric that I had laying around.  I used some white trash bags to diffuse the light and eliminate harsh shadows.  For some extra zing I used a few pieces of aluminum foil as reflectors.  I used a table-top tripod for most of the shots and a stack of books for the tall pieces.  For not knowing much about lighting setup and not having a lot of “real” photo equipment I’m pretty happy with the results.  I might have to crop and batch process the pictures to tweak the curves and do a little sharpening but I think they will work for my website at the very least.  It was fun experimenting with the lighting and figuring out what I wanted.  Some day maybe I’ll have some space to set up a more permanent studio.