New Small Photo Booth for my Home Studio

My photo booth setup, installed in the studio, lights on, and ready for action.

Right before the pandemic forced YVC to move classes online and forced me to teach from home for over a year, my husband finished the extensive renovation on my home studio. The renovation gave me new walls, new floor, all new shelves and tables (except for the wedging table) and a lot more space for my work. I gained the extra space with better storage under my work benches and deeper shelves, but also by removing some awkward furniture and cleaning the place up quite a bit.

The photo booth needs both a deeper and taller shelf space than I had previously with my wooden shelves.

There was even new space for some significant upgrades to my studio equipment. In December I added a pugmill to the studio (which has proven to be a great studio tool!) and this spring I finally added a small photo booth to the studio. 

The photo backdrop has a gradient that provides a nice black to white range behind the work.

I've had a high quality large scale photo backdrop setup for years and I like it a lot. It replaced the lower quality backdrop I bought during graduate school and transported from Wisconsin. But that photo setup is quite large. It works great for large scale sculpture, but as I don't have space for it inside the studio (or the house), I set it up outside and try to take all the photos at once.

Photos of the work on the shelf look bad because of lighting, but also because of all the other stuff in the background or around the work.

The studio at YVC has a small photo booth that is permaently set up and gets used regularly (when students are on campus). This photo booth requires no setup, so students (and I) can just walk over, switch on the light and have quality images of their work without needing to clean a space, adjust lighting or move backdrops.

A plain white, grey, black, or gradient background removes all background distractions of texture, shape, and depth so you can focus on the work.

The photos may not be as high quality as those done by a professional photographer with professional lighting adjusting to get rid of shadows and glare, but they are head and shoulders above pictures taken on a work table. I encourage my students to really think about the quality of their photos because a poor quality photo can make good work look mediocre. I've also found that a good photo can actually make a work look better, or maybe it allows us to focus on qualities we might otherwise overlook in the work.

The small photo setup works great for small scupture and functional work like this citrus squeezer.

So, the upshot is that now that I have the space, I got myself the same photo booth for my home studio, complete with a vinyl gradient backdrop like the one we got for school. In my old home studio, pre-renovation, the photo booth would have had to go on the table or counter, eating up my valuable work space, but the new shelves are deeper and their height can be adjusted. 

I made a lot of citrus squeezers last summer. Many of them are still available if you are looking for one.

I've got the booth on a shelf, where it takes up a lot of space, but it doesn't take up work space. Since I had to put it next to the wheel or the glazing area, I was worried about it getting dirty. At YVC, the booth is way over in the corner of the main studio, away from wheels, sinks, and work spaces. At home I put it near the glazing area, but I've blocked it off when I'm not working on it by using this large whiteboard sign thing.

The whiteboard/image board keeps the photobooth clean and also gives me a visible storage space for inspiration/reference images.

My husband found the white board being thrown ow. It has a plastic front that can be lifted and posters or photos put underneath. Now the whiteboard is doing double duty for me, blocking stray glaze (and some of the dust) from landing on the photo area and also giving me a more convenient spot for reference photos than pinned up on the shelves themselves.

faceted mug and bowls made for student demos for online clay

The small photobooth won't work for my large sculpture and doesn't work great for work intended to be installed on the wall. I'll still have to set up the large backdrop for scupture, but this way I can take photos more often with less effort. My husband, whose pandemic career has become home renovator, is painting and renovating the laundry room. I plan to use the grey walls in that room as a convenient location for photos of work meant to be installed on the wall (shh, don't tell him about my ulterior motives. He thinks this is about laundry).

lots of citrus squeezers, let me know if you want one (or more)

Glazing Mugs, Plates, and Lemon Squeezers

My kid's reaction to a calendar snafu on the first day of online school

I was able to bisque and glaze almost a full kiln last week. Studio work this summer been slow, but work has gotten done. I used up all my porcelain clay and ordered more about a month ago. I ordered it from Tacoma and they sent it USPS to a different address in Yakima. Strangely they sent the other stuff I ordered to my house. Then they had to send they back to Tacoma before sending it back to Yakima for me. 50lbs of the clay made it to my house a week or two ago. The other 50lbs appear to be trapped in the USPS black hole. The clay has left Tacoma, but the tracking doesn't identify any more movement. I assume no one at USPS wants to pick up this 50lb box during the chaos and I don't blame them. 

bisque ware waiting to be glazed, mugs, plates, citrus squeezers and bulbs

Because I used different temperature clay for different projects, I wasn't able to fire the bulbs in the same firing as the plates, mugs, and citrus squeezers, so those haven't gotten done. I keep thinking I will make time to throw some more so I can fill a kiln to fire the mugs and bulbs I finished after this last firing, but I haven't done it yet. Instead I'm working on online classes, doing union stuff, and procrastinating. Today, I am also trying to calm down my kid, whose reaction to online school has been stomping, crying, and generally freaking out. First there was an error in the timing of the first class, then the link to the second class doesn't work. After solving the first issue, she allowed up to 12 minutes for her teacher to help on the second, but just in case he didn't reply, she started freaking out immediately. Um, so my hope for the school year is that this 7th grader learns patience?

porcelain plates from the second firing, and one stoneware clay on the top right

I'm pretty happy with the plates from this batch. In the first round my glaze application was irregular on some, and because I was worried about glazes dripping in the kiln, I put the plates on stilts. This was a dumb solution, because not only did I not put enough glaze on to drip, making the plates look a little splotchy, firing on stilts also warped the plates. This time around I used more glaze and did not stilt the plates, so there's less splotchiness and all the plates are flat and even.

porcelain plates in yellow, pink and peach

I also changed the shape for most of these plates because they were done on request. The person who ordered them wanted small plates with a flat flared rim. She liked them, so three of the six porcelain plates have been sold since I took these pictures. Four of the plates were done in a groggy sculpture clay, which is serviceable, but mutes the glaze colors and doesn't look as nice.

On all the plates I drizzled other colors inside. The reds and a sparkly glaze look particularly nice in person, but the photos didn't capture the colors as well.

I also glazed three screaming face mugs I made with the porcelain clay. I used dark glazes to highlight the features and wrinkles, and a semi-transparent glaze for the entire exterior. I am not excited about the result. The faces look too white and too plain. Part of the problem is the limited number of glazes I had (partly because I used some up on the plates) and part of the problem is that I didn't leave enough of the dark glazes in the wrinkles and indents. I have ordered some new glazes so on the next batch I can bring more color, assuming the glazes also don't end up in USPS limbo.

My kid's reaction to an error in a Google Meet link on the first day of school

I think these faces would look better if I layered more colors. I usually do this with my underglazed sculpture, putting down a base coat on bisque ware before a second firing, then layering a wash of contrasting color over the first. I haven't tried that with these glazes, but I'm considering it. Underglazes and glazes handle differently, but it's worth a shot.

screaming face mug with minimal color in the eyes and eyebrows

I did minimal mixing of colors in these mugs, but I was tentative compared to my "usual" work. I also did some mixing/layering in the new lemon squeezers, but for some reason the yellow and blue showed up best and overwhelm the other colors (or maybe I forgot to use much other than blue and yellow). I know I used the red/pink on at least two pieces and now it is barely evident.

 

most of the citrus squeezers from the second batch, in both porcelain and sculpture clay

Something else happened in the glaze firing for these citrus squeezers. And this requires a bit of back-story. When I was in college, my clay professor told us that anytime we had a contained air pocket, it needed to be pierced so that the air could escape. If not, it would risk blowing up in the kiln. This is pretty conventional wisdom in the clay world and I know I've repeated it often enough. I remember one instance when I remembered too late that I had forgotten to pierce an air hole in a piece. When I opened the kiln I was surprised to see the piece had not exploded. At the time, my professor and I guessed that it was because I was using a raku clay, which is more porous than other clays.

more blue and yellow squeezers

Many years later, I joined a clay community on Facebook. One of the regular topics that comes up over and over again is that air pockets don't cause explosions during firing, only wet clay does. The reasoning goes that air is so small that it either doesn't need to escape or escapes through the walls of the clay. I allowed students to test this theory in class. Usually the pieces didn't explode, but sometimes they did. When asked, the folks in this online clay community assumed that these students must have soaked the pieces before glazing, or the pieces were simply too thick, or there was unaccounted for moisture left even after a long candle (candle means preheating the kiln to drive out excess moisture) or long drying time.

the bottoms of these two squeezers expanded due to expanding air inside during firing

It's difficult to rule out all these options with student work, but the results seemed inconclusive. This still bugs me, so I periodically test the theory. In my first citrus squeezers, I pierced the forms, leaving an unnecessary/essential escape for any heated air. This time around I did not pierce the forms. None of the pieces exploded in either firing, but in the glaze firing the bottoms of two of the pieces, which I had set on stilts in the kiln, expanded during the firing, going from a slightly concave base to a slightly convex base. Meaning that an air pocket inside did, in fact, expand during the firing and was unable to escape, suggesting that my online clay community, despite regular repetitions, is incorrect on this topic.