Photographing Your Work by Eleanor Howick

Eleanor is a member of Wellington Potters Association

Many national exhibitions now select pieces from an initial submission of digital photos. Here are a few tips from Eleanor Howick on how to take good photos of your work easily and reasonably cheaply. As well as submissions for exhibitions and competitions, its  great to have good quality photos for a portfolio, for your member's page on the NZ Potters' website and for exhibition catalogues

What looks good?

Take a look at some published photos of other people's work. Try and look beyond the pot or sculpture to how the photo works as an image. Consider what background was used. Where does the light fall on the piece? Where are the shadows?  Does the light form a strong highlight on the glaze? What angle is the photo taking from? Was the camera high above the piece or on a level with it? I like the Lark Ceramics' 500 series (500 Teapots, 500 Bowls etc.). These books were put together from photos submitted to the editors in a digital form. The judges only had the images to evaluate the pieces by and the chosen photos are all very strong. There are also many good websites to browse.

Most of the photos in the Lark's books are taken against a plain black or grey background, often graduated from dark at the top of the photo to light at the bottom. While other backgrounds can look good if they complement the pot, (I love photographing work against the stones on Eastbourne beach or the Hutt River), stick to a plain kind of background for submissions.

In most photos, if you can see any shadow on the ground at all, it is very fuzzy. There are no horizontal lines behind the piece. You can't see the edge of a table or a horizon line. Look at how the piece is framed. Does the piece go right to the edge of the photo or is there space around the piece? Is the space equal above and below the piece? Is the piece centred left to right in the photo?

Having learned to look critically at other peoples photos, do the same with your own, only be a lot meaner.

What do you need?

A digital camera.

With a film camera it's very hard for a beginner to get the colours to look right.(see below for more discussion on this). A fairly ordinary point and shoot digital camera will do a pretty good job. Features to look for;

• at least 3 mega pixels, you don't really need more than 5 mega pixels,
• manual white balance, this is needed to match the colour of the photo to the colour of the lights you are using,
• a threaded hole on the bottom of the camera to attach it to a tripod,
• a self-timer to give a delay between pushing the shutter button and taking the photo. (you normally use this when you want to take photos with yourself in them).

A zoom lens is good but you could do without. Don't go out and buy the latest, greatest camera, but experiment with what you have or can borrow until you get the basics sorted.

A tripod. Try anything you've got, even the little tabletop models will do for now.

Lights: Collect all the standard lamps and desk lamps in the house. Don't use any with coloured shades on them. Check they all have the same type of bulb in them, either all the old style incandescent bulbs or I much prefer the new energy efficient compact fluorescent bulbs. Which ever, they all need to be the same type.

A backdrop: Fabric doesn't really work. Too much ironing (I don't iron) and it will still have wrinkles. Large sheets of thin cardboard work well, a length of unprinted newsprint (not as stiff as I like, but it would do), or my favourite, the  back side of a plain silver jumbo sized roll of present wrapping paper. I think you can get fancy graduated backdrops from a photographic store but so far I've got similar effects by playing with the lights on plain paper.

Reflectors and diffusers: fancy names for sheets of white cardboard and lengths of thin white cloth (a worn bed sheet or something a bit thinner)
Somewhere to work indoors: where else but the kitchen table. (Clean all your clay and pottery tools off first).

Somewhere to work indoors: where else but the kitchen table. (Clean all your clay and pottery tools off first).

The setup showing the use of backdrop, lights, diffuser, tripod and camera.

The Set-up.

This is shown in the photo on the previous page. The backdrop is taped to the top of the curtain rail and comes down in a smooth curve to the table top. This makes sure you don't get any horizontal lines behind the piece. Avoid getting any creases.

Turn all the lights on and point them at the backdrop for now. Some fluorescent bulbs can take a while to warm up so there's plenty of time for the next step.

Put the camera on the tripod in front of the table, get out the camera manual and figure out how to set the white balance.

Setting the white balance

When using an old  film camera with ordinary film, the film was made so that photos taken in sunlight looked right. The colours in photos taken indoors or with a flash never looked right. The colour a camera “sees” depends on the colour of the object and the colour of the light falling on the object.  Sunlight, incandescent bulbs and fluorescent lights all have different colours that change the colour of the light that comes from the object to the camera or our eyes. We don't normally notice this with our eyes because our brains are really good at adjusting for different light colours.
Most digital cameras can also adjust for the light colour. This is called manually setting the white balance and normally involves pointing the camera at a neutral backdrop and finding the right button to push. Do this with the camera pointed at the backdrop with all the lights on.

While you're reading the camera manual, find out how to set the self-timer. A delay between pushing the shutter button and taking the photo means any wobble in the camera should have stopped by the time the photo is taken. Also turn the camera flash off.

Set up your pot or sculpture and frame the shot, deciding between an initial camera height above or more level with the piece. Arrange the camera and the piece so that only the backdrop shows behind the piece. You could use a computer at a later stage to edit out the bits of your kitchen showing behind the backdrop, but its easier if you miss them in the first place.

Look critically at the light and shadows on and around your piece. Most likely with several lights you will have multiple confusing shadows and an unevenly lit pot.

Here's where those reflectors and diffusers come in. Use the sheets of white cardboard to reflect some of the light in to shadowed areas. Use the sheets as diffusers in front of other lamps to disrupt the sharp shadows. Overlapping light from several lamps will form lighter shadows. Play around heaps and take lots of photos. Pushing the shutter button on a digital camera is free.  If your camera has manual adjustments for focus, exposure time etc. play with these if that's your thing, but auto everything is pretty good.

Review your progress

Download your first dozen or two photos to the computer and examine them critically. Zoom in on different parts of the piece really close to check it's in focus across the whole pot. Decide which photos look better and figure out why.

Go back and take more photos, try different angles for the camera and different arrangements of lights. You may want to turn off any overhead room lights. Don't forget moving the pot is often easier than moving the camera. Try taking some close ups of the surface detail. Keep at it until the photos are good.

Editing

Once you're getting happy with a photo you can do a little editing, but put most of your time into taking better photos. You can't make a bad photo into a good photo on the computer.
Things you can do include cropping (changing where the edges of the photo are), playing with the colours (this shouldn't be necessary if you did the white balance thing earlier) and making the photo smaller (either in number of pixels or reducing the space it takes up on the computer).
If your camera didn't come with a simple photo editing program, a good free program for viewing and doing simple editing is XnView available from www.xnview.com.

The most important editing stuff is setting the physical size (number of pixels) of the photo and/or knowing when and how to make the photo take up less space on the computer (smaller file size). Both these depend on what you are going to do with the photo. If you're just printing it yourself or copying it onto a CD to take down to the print shop to get printed, then the size of the photo files as they came off the camera will be fine. If you're emailing it to someone to put on a website you'll probably want to reduce the number of pixels. If the photo needs to be printed then leave the number of pixels as it is.

A computer screen has a lot less pixels per millimetre than a printed photo. If you look at a photo straight from your camera on the screen full size (zoom in to 100%)  then you'll probably only see a corner of the photo. If the photo is going to be used only on a website resize it so the whole photo can be seen on the screen at 100%.

The details for an email  submission of photos may say the total size of the photo files submitted can't be larger than 1 megabyte. The file size of photos straight from your camera may be more then 1 megabyte each. Resizing the photo as above will reduce the file size but you can also reduce it by saving the photo with the type  “jpg”. With most image programs you'll have an option to choose the quality of the saved image. The lower the quality, the smaller the file size. This trick reduces the number of colours in the image. For example the image may have thousands of subtly different shades of mid grey in it. Saving the photo as a low quality “jpg” will replace all these colours with one average mid grey. Experiment with the quality setting to achieve the file sizes you need without compromising the look of the image.

Save the photos and they're ready to submit.

Next Steps

A more sophisticated set-up might be to try using a light box. This is a large cube made with translucent white fabric walls (see photo on next page) The piece goes inside the box and the light sources outside. The fabric walls give very diffuse all round light on the piece. You can make one of these, or WPA has recently purchased one for use at the rooms.

So have fun and take a huge number of photos. The most important step in taking good photos is to critically evaluate your photos and repeat until they improve.

Eleanor Howick
25 Oct 2008