The Everglades

Of all the things we did on our trip, this was the most WILD! Alligators, anhingas, herons and all sorts of other amazing things!!!


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Seaworld

While Aurora and I sat in Orlando with a 5 hour layover, we decided to DO SOMETHING with our time. So we hopped into a cab and went to Seaworld. Here's some of what we did.


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New slideshow from our trip to Florida

After trying to sort through the hundreds of pictures that Aurora and I took on our trip, we have whittled it down to these. Enjoy.


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Gone to Florida

Took a break from the studio this week to come down to Florida with my daughter to visit my family. Once we made it to Miami we headed down to Key Largo with my brother Martin and my mom in tow. We had the most amazing time snorkeling off the reef. Saw fish of every size and shape imagineable!! On the way back up the keys we stopped in at Dolphin Cove and SWAM with dolphins! Originally the plan was that only A would be going in the water to swim with the dolphins... then my mom sprung the surprise... I GOT TO GO TOO!!! Talk about amazing. Nothing in the world really prepares you for such a stunning experience. Rather than write more, here are some pics.

Ready, Sets, Go

Another week passes and we are up to our eyeballs in pots. This week was spent making oval forms. We had an order for some casseroles (which I no longer keep in stock as part of our line..)
which needed to be much larger than our normal old-style baking dishes... think 14"x10" ... which means throwing the form at 16'x12". That's a mighty BIG casserole. Looks more like a battleship compared to our little pots.

One of the things Nancy and I have been playing with is the idea of sets. In the past, everything we made was sold piecemeal. Now we're hoping that by combining pots into sets of forms, they'll sell as a unit. We shall see. I think the tumblers on the tray above is a good place to start. More to come.

I also had a chance this week to make oval vases again. My hope was to have a few days in a row to really make an extensive series, but our cat Ferro has been in and out of the hospital with urinary tract issues. No fun! With only a few more days to be in the studio before a week's hiatus (kid and I are heading to FL for some snorkeling and some exploring in the Everglades) there isnt much time to get hip deep in more work.

We are definitely getting closer to that end of March deadline as we get ready for Craft Boston.

Getting Caught Up

This weekend was incredibly productive in the studio. Nancy went to town making plates. Board after board of oval platters, dinner plates, salad plates and dessert plates... they just kept coming all weekend. She took Friday off work for a snowday. Ended up spending most of the morning trying to get our cat Ferro to the hospital. Add a wicked ice storm to the mix, and it made for a very exciting and tense morning.

We unloaded another kiln this weekend. Some pretty amazing pots came out. More oval pitchers and oval platters. The gallery is started to look fully stocked again. It's ABOUT TIME!!!
Our goal at this point is to be really overstocked by the time we leave for Boston at the end of next month. We're getting there.

Nancy spent a huge chunk of time over the past week stripping, sanding and priming the new booth parts. Still a lot more to go. After trying out some chemical stripper on some of the big hollow doors we use for shelves, we decided that strippers just arent meant for us. Talk about GOOEY! What a mess!! To save time and frustration we went to Home Depot and bought NEW hollow core doors. Done. Tonight they'll be primed and tomorrow they can be painted. Easy.

Sometimes the hassle just isnt worth it. We try very hard to be as eco-conscious as possible in this family.... but there's definitely a point of diminishing returns!

Pitchers and more

After a long wait, we finally have some new images of the pitchers we've been playing with. I wont say much tonight... since I really should be outside loading the next glaze kiln! But, tomorrow while this kiln cools, I will post an update about some of the things Nancy and I have been working on in the shop.

For now, enjoy the new pics of the pitchers.

Sign of the times

A couple of weeks back, we were out on a drive, just cruising around the top of Cayuga Lake. Figured we would head over to Auburn for a photo-jaunt. The sky was grey, no snow... not the best light for winter photography. At the end of the day, Nancy took my favorite picture of the day.

Makes me wish we had some sign in Trumansburg that was as iconic and ironic and just plain funny as this one. Talk about a landmark!

Let them eat cake!

The old Dessert plates are DEAD. Long live the dessert plate!
Today we sold the last of the old style dessert plates.

Now we can put our focus on the NEW dessert plates which are so much nicer.
Deeper sides, more easily stacked and most importantly; less likely to warp!

Revisions

Here we are, dead of winter, and there's no sign of snow. Grass is green(ish)...and the ground seems frozen. Makes taking winter photographs really tough! I had hoped to have new pictures of finished oval platters, dinner plates and dessert plates sometime this week. Still not there yet.

I spent today washing and waxing pots. I think, at the end of the day, there were enough pots waxed to fill at least two kiln loads. Having those new pots in the gallery will be really sweet.

We've spent this month really looking at what aspects of our pottery needs some updating or revising. If you have something you really want to see, now is a good time to speak up so we are able to at least add your ideas to the discussions.

Here's to ongoing revisions!!

Working with images

I have put off installing the latest version of Photoshop... mostly because I am still trying to learn all that Photoshop 7 had to offer. The new Nikon D80 came with some trial software called Nikon Capture NX. Specifically designed to work with RAW NEF images from Nikon cameras, it is the most amazing software I have every worked with. It makes changes MUCH faster than Photoshop. It has more commonsense pre-programmed settings... it just WORKS better.

So, here's what I was playing with tonight. A photo of Ferro and part of the mozaic of images from yesterday. I can't get over how rich and saturated the colors can be!

Very Un-January like weather

Not really sure I have the words to describe how bizzare it is to see grass growing in the middle of January. It would be one thing if this were a visit to Miami. Nope. This is the field across the road from our house and studio.

Just wait till summer 08 at the Johnson Museum at Cornell University

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platters coming to Cornell in 2008

Created with dumpr.net - fun with your photos

dumpr.net

Created with dumpr.net - fun with your photos

Shelves Shaping Up

When I started building our new dining room shelves back in September I figured we would be done in a day or two. Hmmm. Talk about understatement. I finished building them in about a week. Painted them for the following week. Then they sat in the guest room from October till YESTERDAY. Nancy got it into her head that THIS was the weekend for us to FINALLY put these monstrosities up on the wall ONCE AND FOR ALL. So we did.
Here's what it looked like throughout the installation.

Check back later in the week when we will hopefully have new pictures of the new oval platters, and the new dessert plates and maybe even a nice pic with both the dessert and salad plates together.

The Dinner Plates have left the building

We have a WINNER WINNER WINNER!!!!

Thanks to the Meeker and Meeker-Robertson families the whole PILE of dinner plates have left the builiding. We thought it would be a week or two before someone decided to grab this offer. Nope. Didn't even make it to noon on Saturday. NICE. Glad we could help fill out both sets of dinnerware.

So, for the rest of the folks who have emailed asking for one plate or two.... There will be occasions where we can be bribed to make a few dinner plates now and then. Just dont ask till after we get through this Winter. Bribes need to be pretty good too.

All of this begs the question... Who needs more of the dessert plates to flush out their collection. We sold a few of the forest ones on Friday... but there are SO MANY... make a reasonable offer and you could walk away with a LOT of cute little dessert plates in lots of fun colors!!!

Oval forms

After getting the first three oval platters out of the kiln this week, I am anxious to see the next 10 or so being made! They are a wonderful form. Lends itself to handles or lugs. Also would work nicely with a set of mugs on it, or a oil and vinegar cruet set.... tons of ideas to play with. I would love to have a larger oval too. Something closer to 12-15" long would be sweet. So, maybe if the weather clears tomorrow and I can get outside to make some sawdust it will happen. In the meantime here is what the final image will look like on our 2008 pricelist.

What it means when someone says RAW

Today marks my first real foray into the real of RAW. No, I'm not talking about the 7degrees that marked the high temp today. I am talking about RAW format... which in the case of Nikon means a file type of NEF. I spent a fair bit of time today exploring options using Nikon's Capture NX software. It is more like working with a negative in the darkroom than anything else. Not really the same as Photoshop or any other editor. Working in RAW really gives you enormous latitude in terms of exposure, value, depth, focus, fixing lens abberations, color, white balance. Too many things to mention. Suffice to say, anyone exploring the RAW setting on their camera needs to own this book: Art of RAW Conversion: How to Produce Art-Quality Photos with Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Leading RAW Converters by Juergen Gulbins, Uwe Steinmueller (find it at Amazon )

this is the original image, no post-camera processing

This is what I was able to do in a very short time with the RAW converter in Nikon Capture.




In the studio things have been wicked productive. I feel like I am starting to catch up on orders (though they are still coming in almost everyday!) and I feel like the pots are even better than what was being made a month or two ago. Always a good feeling for sure.

Nancy and I spent the New Years holiday making new forms from which to make our new oval trays, new dessert plates, and finally the new dinner plates. All are squared forms, with the oval being the most "oval". After roughing out the ideas on paper, we jumped straight into working out the forms in 2x12 fir. My little old jigsaw just couldn't do it so we found ourselves at Home Depot looking for a replacement. This is what we found... a Bosch.

So here are some images of the new wooden forms and the plates we've been making so far:

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.