White Balance

I guess by now everyone else probably understands the significance of ensuring that a camera's white balance is set correctly... but I didnt. Never really had much call to play with that using my old Olympus. The new D80 has a few hoops to jump through to manually set the white balance, but once that's done, WATCH OUT! Talk about sharp color.

Next step: shooting under the lightbox with tungsten bulbs tomorrow evening.

The upper image was shot in the gallery tonight, totally black outside (snowing even!), so the lighting was a mix of halogen and incandescent. The second image is filtered using a mix of settings in Nik Color Effects. The lower two images were shot outside in the morning. My hope was to compare these shots to ones I took earlier this fall with the Olympus. From what I can see so far, the older camera had a better "super" macro setting. Also has an LCD which tilts so you can shoot from the hip or over your head. Going "back" to shooting through a viewfinder is kind of awkward. Almost makes me wish we had bought the D300, but then again, spending $1900 on just the camera body was out of the question. As it is, we spent another $200 on the camera tonight, buying accessories and filters. Fun fun fun.

More pics from the NEW camera

I can't begin to express how jazzed I am about working with this new camera. I LOVE IT.
Makes taking pictures so much fun. I have loved my Olympus for the last 5 years and have definitely gotten my money's worth out of it. This new Nikon is just amazing. I guess the downside is that I have a few month's worth of re-learning all the in's and out's of this camera's controls and settings. Here are a few shots in the studio shot with available light at ISO 1000. Pretty sweet color and contrast and tight grain. IMPRESSIVE.

Today the new camera arrived. Finally took the plunge and bought a DLSR. All I can say is that the glass alone was worth it!!! Talk about fun lenses. I have so much to learn, tons to practice and a whole new bag of toys to play with!! Happy New Year for sure.

Merry Christmas to all

Today we unloaded our last firing for the year. Jam-packed with soup mugs, footed mugs and dessert plates and salad plates. Had a few small serving bowls in there and even a few oval pitchers. I probably wont have time to get nice images made before the new year, but rest assured, they are coming! The oval pitchers are really sweet; one in cranberry and the other in butter.

It is official: This was our last firing using the three glazes destined for the vault.... butter yellow, cranberry, and blackberry. We will still make it possible for folks with dinnerware sets to get replacements for broken pots...but we will no longer have regular firings with these three colors any longer. Bye bye blackberry, cranberry and butter. We hardly knew ya.

Last week before Christmas

And all through the studio....
BOXES were being packed and shipped. The FedEx guys must hate this time of year. Usually we ship 2-3 boxes per week. This week's tally so far, 10 for today, another 3 on Friday and 4 more on Christmas eve.

A few changes have been made to our holiday preview page of pottery. Quite a few things disappeared over the weekend. If all goes well today, I should have time to shoot some more new images of the pots that have come out of the last 2 firings.

More pots for the Holidays

Another week has come and gone. Pots are coming out of the kiln hot and are being shipped out almost before they are cool to the touch. I am seeing more of my FedEx pickup driver than I am seeing of my family! We are very nearly caught up with the last of our holiday orders. If all goes well over the next week we should see the last 3 firings of the year.

NEW POTS:

click here to check out the latest pots from the kiln!

Beginning in January we will be setting aside three of our glazes: Butter, Blackberry and Cranberry will all be going away. We may bring them back now and again, but they will no longer be in production. For anyone who has purchased dinnerware from us in the past few years, replacements for settings will still be available, but we will no longer have these three glazes in use on all of our forms.

Other news:
We have begun work on the new booth design. Nancy is jazzed about some of the new design ideas for the booth. Lots of little details that we hope will come together cohesively over the next few months. March is starting to seem VERY close at hand.

Holiday Pots so far

Well, here we are... 20 days away from Christmas. I have been getting a lot of emails and phone calls from folks asking "WHERE ARE THE POTTERY PICTURES????"

To that end, here they are!

Nancy and I will do our best to fill orders, pull pots and to update the site as pots sell.

click here and enjoy.


Open Daily 10am-5pm (even later if you call and let us know you need us open!)


Cold Springs Studio Pottery
4088 Cold Springs Road
Trumansburg, NY 14886

607-387-4042 voice/fax
info@coldspringsstudi.com
www.coldspringsstudio.com

Getting Ready for the Holidays

The past couple weeks have been very interesting. Sales have definitely taken an upturn. Quite a relief after nearly 5 months of being devoid of customers this year.

Good news: I will be updating the blog as often as every other day through the month. My goal is to try to help everyone see what is available in the gallery for the holidays. We are shipping FedEx almost daily at this point.

The bad news: we are NOT doing a studio sale this Christmas. Usually we have one either the first or second weekend in Dec. We are NOT doing that this year. Instead we are going to be open every day throughout the month. We are also open late many nights. CALL and we can make arrangements to be open whenever shopping NEEDS to happen!

Lastly, get ready for the email explaining where to look for all of your holiday shopping needs from the studio. My hope is that it will hit the email highway tomorrow morning!