Pottery photos

The postmark deadline for Lark's new 500 Teapots book is today, and in about ten minutes, I will go to the post office to mail off four photos taken by a friend, professional photographer Adrian Moreno. I also wanted to submit a detail photo for one of the teapots, but I didn't have any from Adrian and--procrastinator that I am--didn't leave time to ask him to take any. Having also procrastinated about that 2010-into-2011 New Year's resolution to build a workable set up for photographing my pots, I ended up spending this morning futzing with my old dented Canon PowerShot A620, trying to get some good close ups. I took the teapot outside for some natural partly cloudy light and took about 100 pictures. I learned a lot about glare and the complete randomness of getting the microphotography feature to actually focus, developed an increasingly steady hand (I was too lazy to get out a tripod, but not too lazy to take 100 photos), and ended up with this:

It looks a little sharper after it's run through an "autocorrect" filter, but the submission guidelines say not to do that, so that's that. I'm impressed by the detail of the crystals; thanks to the photo, I'm noticing details on the pot that I'd never seen before.

In other photograph submission news, I sent some shots of assorted geek pots to the 2012 Bridges conference on math/art intersections, and they were accepted! Charlie Evergreen took the first two photos below. I took the third--yes, I need to work on that photography set up--yet it's the tori that are going into the month-long (vs. conference-long) exhibit in Towson's College of Fine Arts gallery. Just goes to show what happens when mathematicians instead of potters evaluate your work.