How Many Years Ago?

Back in 1993, my parents came up to see me graduate from Hampshire College. I was fortunate enough to be able to time my final thesis exhibit for their visit. Not an easy thing during the spring when everyone needs a place to show off their projects.

Trying to find a suitable gallery space in May in the Happy Valley can be downright impossible. Instead of a traditional gallery space with white walls and track lighting, I held my show in the Hampshire College greenhouse attached to the Cole Science Center. My red glazes never looked better!

So why am I sharing this old photo?

This month, Aurora and I took a drive to Vermont and then MA to the Happy Valley to look at schools. It is getting to be the time for Aurora to apply to schools. She had asked about visiting Hampshire while we were in town looking at Amherst College. After we finished the school tour and the info session, she and I walked the campus together after having lunch in the dining hall. She asked if she could sit in on a class in the science building, and arranged things with the professor so she could. We were about a half hour early for her class so we walked through the building. I figured why not show her what the greenhouse is like on a warm spring day. It must have been over 85F in there. And humid! Quite a shock from the chill 40F outside. As soon as Aurora saw the space she understood what it took to host this show in that space. Certainly not the usual space to host an exhibit.

Seeing that space again after all this time certainly brought back memories. It was quite possibly my most brief exhibition. By far it was the most humid! The attendance was incredible. Potters from all over came to show their support. As my first solo exhibition it marked a new point in my clay career.

Go Through The Door

Booth shot at Logan, UT, Summerfest craft show, 1997

Ah, the ubiquitous and obligatory "booth shot". If you've done a craft show, art festival, street fair, you name it... they all want a "booth shot". In the twenty years I made pottery, I made quite a few different booth displays. Thankfully, I only have images from the last 15 years or so. The first few were nothing more than milk crates and wooden planks. 

After building my first "serious" booth in Ithaca, in 1994 (out of old WWII packing crate lumber and masonite) I graduated to using hollow-core doors for my both displays. Now that we are no longer selling pottery, our booth display was given to another local potter. Some of those hollow-core doors are still being used in our life as desktops, bookshelves, etc. 

It never occurred to me when I first started using hollow-core doors that they would end up being an almost ubiquitous building material. The best ones by far were the older ones with luan plywood inside them for the internal structure. The more modern ones all use a cardboard honeycomb for support. The cheaper the door, the less support on the interior support. 

Booth shot, Ithaca Festival, Ithaca, NY 2005

Booth shot in Vail, CO, 1998

Ancient History

This was from a photo session we did with my friend, Carrie Crane, when she came out for our second Mother's Day Sale, way back when. The studio finally had new siding, new lighting, a newly refinished interior with fresh sheetrock and paint... it was gorgeous! And for nearly ten years, that was our studio.

Wishing I Had Saved

Every now and then, it dawns on me that all the footed mugs I am going to make in Trumansburg as part of Cold Springs Studio are made. That's it. There won't be any more. Usually it takes a call from someone I haven't heard from in five years, who still thinks that we might be open by chance this weekend... before my mind is jogged back to pre-Sept 2009.

Tonight I was looking through old images. I stumbled across these old footed mugs. They aren't terribly amazing, but they were good mugs. I am sure they sold within a week of being photographed. We never had more than half a dozen in the studio for more than a week. I always tried to have at least two dozen in the wings, but if we had a good weekend full of sales, we might sell a dozen footed mugs in an hour's time.

My friend, Renata Wadsworth, bought a used gas kiln off of CraigsList recently. I am excited to see how her gas reduction results compare to her usual woodfired pots. I never got around to building our big gas kiln because I fell in love with cone 6 oxidation color. It wasn't something I planned for... just kinda happened. Now I look back at those surfaces and wish that I had more pots still waiting in the wings to be glazed. Sure would make gift giving a lot easier this holiday season. (kidding... nah, sorta)

Waiting for Cake

One of the things that Nancy said she wanted from the very first time she saw one, was Kristen Kieffer's cake plates. We ordered this from Kristen back when we were planning our vow renewal ceremony. As we got closer to our tenth anniversary, we both realized that the money we had planned to spend on the event was better used for other more practical things (lawyers, surgeons, etc).  We just celebrated our 11th anniversary, which traditionally is associated with gifts of steel. I would much rather have pottery any day of the week.

Kristen's pottery is top notch, in every way. So often potters are either mud-people, fire-people or they want to paint but are afraid of a big canvas. Kristen eschews those stereotypes, aiming straight into the heart of the traditions of decoration. Finding inspiration in everything from English silver teaware, to needlework, to gardening to wallpaper prints... Kristen manages to combine so many different cultures and aesthetics into a cohesive body of work that just begs to be used and displayed for everyone to enjoy.

Long long time ago

This image was created sometime around 2005. We had just finished creating our first brochure and were working on new images for our website. The original image was photographed with an Olympus C-5050Z... now a 10 year old, 5MP camera, with one of the snappiest lenses I have ever used.

Back in 2010, I began working with Lightroom (probably version 2 or 3), and one of the first things I did was re-edit some of my older images. Partly to see them in a new light, but also just to mess around with images that I liked, but weren't mission critical at the time. Back when I edited this, we were still under the assumption that I would be able to make pots again someday.

Last weekend, I celebrated 4 years since waking up from the coma. Not really something I feel like advertising. Worth sharing? Perhaps. I don't know anymore.

Another Amazing Round of Pots from Cary Joseph

Cary Joseph brought over more pots from another woodfiring he participated in during August. Each wood kiln has such a different signature in terms of the effects it leaves on the pots. Cary's work allows the fingerprint from each firing to tell a unique story. One of the best parts of being a photographer of fine crafts is getting to hear all the cool stories surrounding the making of the wares. I love hearing about the various kilns, loading and unloading rituals, all the forming processes... all of it!

Photographing Cary Joseph's Woodfired Pots Today

I spent my morning today, photographing Cary Joseph's latest woodfired pots. These came out of the anagama down in Corning. Such incredible surfaces!

It is always such a treat to see Cary's newest pots. I feel like a kid in a candy shop. I get to hold these pots before they head out into the great-big-world. I get to figure out which face looks the best. Best of all, I get to visit with Cary and hear all about what he's been working on, which shows are coming up and all the fun pottery related stuff that I miss so much.

Here is a link to all the photos in this session:  http://www.alexsolla.com/CJ2013/

How To Know You Have Arrived

One of the surest ways I have ever found to know for certain, "when you have arrived" is when your pots wind up in the local Salvation Army or antique store. When I lived in Logan, UT, I was shocked to find student pots in the local Deseret Industries (LDS version of Salv.Army). After a while, it made sense. Lots of student turn-over, lots of brown crunchy pots laying around for the next tenants to deal with: Off to the thrift store they go!

Yesterday Nancy and I were hitting the rounds of antique stores in Bloomfield, NY. There used to be quite an array of antique stores all along Routes 5+20 through central NY. Bloomfield was our favorite destination for years!

Yesterday we found one of my oval vases in one of the antique stores. It was a really nice oval vase, undulating rim, sweet little handles/ears, and glazed in Cranberry. Selling for $9.50. Talk about "having arrived!" I was right there next to the Fire King dishes and the other random collectibles that someone thought would be worth something someday. $9.50.

Caught Cheating With An Old Friend

Back in 2002, Nancy and I took a big leap. While I was recovering from my second back surgery, brought on not by the heavy lifting issues of pottery, but rather by the stresses that came from a desk job at Cornell. Ironic. I worked in an air conditioned library, handling the operations, complaints and billing problems. It should have been a relaxing job, but not at the Hotel School at Cornell. But that is a story for another time...

I want to talk about what I did during my recuperation from my second back surgery.

The leap was to try to get our pottery studio off the ground... to get our work into galleries and to start wholesaling our pots around the northeast. In order to make that happen we visited a newly opened gallery in Watkins Glen in hopes that the owner would be willing to purchase our pots wholesale. He asked for a price list and we were incredibly unprepared. I had expected that he would want to see pots in hand, not some price list.

After getting turned down flatly, we licked our wounds and started figuring out what we would need to do to create better promotional materials for the studio. We knew we needed a price list that reflected our broad range of glazes that could be had on about sizteen different forms at the time. Unfortunately, we didn't own a digital camera so we borrowed one from the tech department at the Hotel School. It was the older brother to the camera we would end up purchasing as our first digital camera. With that little camera we set up tungsten lights, figured out a backdrop of white seamless and shot some of the absolute worst photos of pots I have ever seen. But they were ours and they started us down our current path.

The next step was buying our own camera so we wouldn't be reliant on borrowing the camera when we needed it. I did my research and settled on the Olympus C-5050z. It got better reviews than any of the new up and coming dslrs. Color fidelity was off the charts. It was a 5MP camera in a time when everyone thought 3-4MP would be plenty large enough. Who would want bigger? Memory cards were measured in 32, 64, and 128MB. Eventually we wound up buying 2  256MB cards thinking that even with a hard day shooting, we wouldn't fill the cards. Seems so quaint ten years later.

I would love to say that there was something horrible about this camera. I would love to say that it failed to create amazing images. As you can see in these images, they are fantastic. It was a workhorse. Sure, I had my gripes, but I also loved it dearly. After about three years of shooting with it, we bought a Nikon D80, thinking that the availability of a broader range of lenses would be a huge asset to my photographic skill.  

While the D80 was (and is) a fantastic camera, it has its faults too. Nikon simple fails to have the color fidelity that Olympus seems to achieve so easily. I struggled constantly with getting my sunset glaze to appear in photos the way it looked on the pots. Throughout these years, we built a couple different overhead lightboxes, using primarily tungsten "hot" lights. Around 2008 we switched to daylight balanced fluorescent bulbs that were about $40 a pop. We figured we would never need to buy a new bulb ever again. 

Throughout this entire span of about five years, these images that we took in our first few months photographing pottery as Cold Springs Studio, hold their own specifically because they were fun! One of the best things about the Olympus C-5050z was that it had an articulating LCD screen on the back. Looking at it compared to any modern camera and it looks tiny. At the time, it seemed HUGE! By articulating up and down, I was able to look down on the screen much like I did with some of the medium format cameras with the waist level finders. Much easier than having to get down low and look through the tiny tiny viewfinder. It also meant that with a small wireless remote, I could trigger the camera's shutter and avoid all sorts of vibration and shake. 

When folks tell me that you have to have the latest and greatest camera for your clients, I am mystified. This was a 5MP camera. Cameras nowadays are 16-24MP for the most part... and yet everyone is still clamoring for higher pixel count. The photo of the plates below was blown up to poster size as well as being used on our studio open house postcards... and it never showed the limitations of low resolution. Hmmm.

The race is on now for cameras to have obscenely high ISO sensitivity. Some of the latest dslrs have the ability to take darkness and turn it into daylight (or pretty darned close). The problem is that the depth of the color in most instances has suffered. My Olympus C-5050z would almost always be set at ISO 64. Yeah, low ISO, higher color fidelity. Amazing tonal range. There was something "fleshy" about the colors. They never seemed muddy or off.

So why am I talking about this ancient camera? After my surgery last week, I am limited to lifting ten pounds or less for the next few months. Where my Nikon is concerned, that is doable, but not easy. Just putting a few lenses into my bag, along with my D300s body, and other assorted stuff I always seem to need on a shoot, and suddenly that bag weighs twenty pounds at the very least.

During my week-long hospital stay, I found myself using my only available camera... the one in my iPad. I am not a big Apple fanboy. Sorry. If you are, enjoy it. I can certainly appreciate the design experience, but there are so many failings of Apple products for me, but that can be discussed another time. As I was saying.... I was shooting things in the hospital by using my iPad. What I enjoyed more than anything was being able to do all of my post-processing immediately. Flip from the Camera setting to any one of the dozens of photo editing apps, and BOOM! It was edited, played with, saved and shared to Facebook. Total elapsed time: minutes. Hmmm.

All of a sudden I was enjoying photography for a new/old reason. I was digging the immediacy of the process. More importantly though I think, was that there are some massive limitations of using an iPad compared to a "real" dslr. For me, those limitations become easy access to creative problem solving. It forces my brain to do more thinking than just going click. This was also the case back when I was using the Olympus C-5050z.

Since returning home from the hospital three days ago, I have taken the Olympus everywhere I go. It hasn't left my side. I shoot things that I would normally ignore. They aren't snapshots as much as feelings. They are an attempt for me to find visual ways to communicate some of the difficult aspects of the healing process. I never thought I would fall in love with this little camera again, but I am head over heels. It is such a pain in the ass camera compared to my Nikons; it shoots slow as hell, it sucks down batteries, it takes forever to process just one image, and the list goes on and on. When I load them up in Lightroom, at least half are blurry due to the lack of optical stabilization (or faster shutter speed)...but the few images that are spot on, ... those images are what I want. And it makes me want to push myself harder each time I pick it up.

At the end of the day, I am left wondering if there is a modern equivalent of this tiny handful of a camera. Is there something out there that will make me gush like this ten years from now? Quite a few photographers have suggested I go with the Fujifilm X100s which just came out. Other ideas? Have you used something that you think would work perfectly for my needs? I am all ears.