Decent photos - the problem

All too often we see "indecent photos" of quilts - blurry, angled, and with strange things happening in the background ... or half in shadow, half with colour bleached out.

It's one thing to have them on blogs (here today, gone tomorrow) but quite another to see poor photos in magazines, or even quilt-group newsletters. Editors tear their hair and gnash their teeth at the quality of photos they get sent. And time and time again we're told that the quality of the images submitted for this or that exhbition was not acceptable.

So what do you do about taking better pictures? You need to know how to prepare your quilt for photography, how to set up the shoot, what settings to use on your camera. What you do with the images afterwards is another area of expertise, but there are simple things you can do that make a big difference.

First of all, what's a "decent photo" of a quilt? At a minimum:
1-large file size (for printing, minimum 5MB)
2-in focus
3-taken dead square
4-saturated colours

Following from this, there are some simple things you can do:

1. Set your camera to the biggest file setting. Every camera differs, but the principle is the same; on mine, this is done via Menu Set, and the first option is Picture Size, which ranges from 0.3M to 12M; I used 5M as the standard setting, and will up the file size when taking any quilt photo that will be printed out. Often the camera has a Quality setting - put it on "Fine".

2. Wait for the camera to focus - it's not always instantaneous! Click halfway and let the camera do its job, then click all the way. Most cameras have an Anti-Shake setting (often called Stabilizer) - I love it and use it all the time as a standard setting.

3. Use a tripod if possible, with camera set dead square to the centre of a quilt pinned to a board that is vertical, not slanted.
Here's my tame photographer doing just about all the right things when photographing my Breakthrough quilt. What's relevant here is that the camera is on a tripod and is centred on the quilt, which is pinned to a board. The board could be at a better vertical angle, and it could have an even more neutral background, but we knew we'd be adjusting for those factors when processing the photo. (In Photoshop we used Transform-Skew to make it square, and Magnetic Lasso-Invert-Levels to cut away the background.)

4. Saturated colours rather than too-pale or too-dark - some cameras allow adjusting the colour, and sometimes you have to do this in a photo manipulation program. The main thing when taking the photo is to have even light so the colours can attain their values. This is why it's best to photograph in the shade, not the sunlight - sunlight leaches out the colour. And avoid having a shadow fall on part of the quilt!

One thing I've realised is that I don't actually "know" my camera - when I got it, I turned off the sounds, put it on automatic, checked that it was set to Auto White Balance, Anti-Shake, and Flash Off, and mostly use it in that mode, as I mostly take snapshots; it's small enough to live in my bag, and I use it every day.

It takes a while to get out of "film mentality" - instead of being careful about what you take, with digital photography the modus operandi is to take lots of photos ... and then delete 90% from the camera, before downloading to your computer. (Deleting is so important!)

But to get back to taking decent photos of quilts - here's where "film mentality" comes back into use - be careful in setting up the photo. Take several, making minor adjustments - that's what professional photographers do, they "bracket the shot" at different exposures, then choose the best result.

The term's work

It's been a week since "the assessment". On the morning of the day, all the bits and pieces were waiting for a final check against the list - personal statement, statement of intent, tutorial reports, sketchbooks (labelled with start date), "the drawing project", and of course the all-important Self-Reflective Journals, which in my case consist of printouts of the relevant posts from this blog.
In the portfolio were the worksheets, beginning with those coloured squares (hated doing them) and finishing with some personal work, my Breakthrough quilt - a subject relevant to, and intertwined with, my theme of Inside-Outside-In between. They were all A1 size, only the photo sizes have been changed for ease of posting -Finished sculpture projects - carving, casting, and the outdoor project -Research for the outdoor sculpture - ideas, and materials -
Finished ceramics items - pinch pots, vessels, and slabs -
The rest of the worksheets are research towards the project next term - insides, outsides, structures, houses, artworks - a real hodge-podge.
Doors and floorplans
Surfaces - quite a lot of frottage, from the ceramic slabs - and, on a postcard, another of my quilts, from the Fissures exhibition (the one that I'd left on the train) -
I arrived at City Lit rather early and had time to sit in the caf and have a coffee and do some drawing in the fat new little sketchbook, which I aim to fill by the end of December -
Upstairs we waited in the corridor outside the room to be called.
Twenty minutes later, it was all over - not so bad. This was followed by some hanging round in the corridor, chatting, and in the caf, more chatting - "how did it go?" Now we wait for our grades.

The process was a time of consolidation for me. Focusing on putting those [expletive deleted] worksheets together in a limited space of time was like putting everything into a sausage grinder and out came ... nice little useful sausages, ready for frying next term. Noooo, not quite! Paper-making might be a better analogy: the pulp is dispersed in the water, and doing the worksheets was like using a screen to pick up the pulp to gather it all into a useful sheet of paper, for writing on or cutting up or folding, I'm not sure what; making into a book maybe?

Sculpture week 12

The last class of term (last week) started in a ferment of activity -After producing lots of worksheets for the assessment, I was in the mood to start another -
(Yes, that bradawl and the thread live in the pencil case - and very useful both of them are!)

Several people kindly looked at my drawings and told me what they thought might be going on, which was very interesting, because I was simply "doing" and not thinking much about what was happening. Punching holes with various pencils etc was ... cathartic.
Apart from the idea of "something lurking under the stairs, that might grab you by the ankle as you climbed up", I really don't know what's going on in these, and even that idea has lots of Jungian overtones ... for instance, you're not afraid of being grabbed by the ankles as you go down the stairs, just up. Up to that barred, handle-less door ... hmm ...
After class, a little gathering in the caf, with some last-minute augmentation of sketchbooks, as some people haven't had their assessment yet -

Art I Like - Stuart Haygarth

An "ongoing relationship with abandonned objects" and "fascination with taxonomy" characterise the work of Stuart Haygarth, on show at Haunch of Venison. He collects discarded objects, such as these broken wing mirrors collected from the roads of London (so many! what stories could they tell...) -These reflections are through the chandelier made of spectacles -
Another chandelier made of lenses is in the cafe (which has some lovely cake stands made of plates separated by ornate upturned glasses - neglected to photograph those, will have to go back...) -
And what of the rest of the pairs of spectacles, the bit that goes round your ear? He's made more chandeliers of those, which look like clusters of evil insects - I couldn't bear to photograph them, or even grab an image from the web, but if you go to image 21 of the installation images here you can see them.

After art school Haygarth worked for 15 years as a photographic illustrator, until in 2004 he started to use his lost and found memorabilia to create lighting installations. The first was a lampshade made of party poppers collected after Millennium Eve.

He says: "My work revolves around everyday objects, collected in large quantities, categorized and presented in such a way that they are given new meaning. It is about giving banal and overlooked objects new significance" and "I'm not interested in design as functional problem solving, I like the fact that there's a history or a narrative behind each piece that I make."

Xmas on Bond Street

As the early afternoon darkness draws in, the lights go on -And in the windows, expensive jewels are displayed amid cut-paper fantasies -

Xmas on Stroud Green Rd

The many trees for saleand our very own jolly lights
Such a festive time of year!

After hours

Kapoor mania in London town

On its last day, the Anish Kapoor exhibition was open till midnight, reportedly with long queues. This show has proved very, very popular - because it has amazing objects/work in it - with showmanship as well as subtle messages and deep thinking. Perhaps because of this he got a lot of publicity in conjunction with the show - including a good tv programme (if you can use BBC iPlayer, it's interesting to watch; 18 days left at time of writing) - click here. There are lots of other media links on that page.
Otherwise, go to the Royal Academy website - you'll be amazed at what one artist can do to ruin a perfectly good art gallery - he shoots red waxy stuff out of a cannon - see that here. Afterwards, lots more links appear to other little videos to watch...

In one part of the gallery, a huge block of the red waxy stuff moves through the doorways between three rooms. In another room, cubes and other shapes are made out of mirrors - fascinating to watch people looking at themselves in the mirrors, they distort their bodies, always amusing.
Kapoor first got known for his piles of pure pigments - he considers colour to be a "thing", rather than a quality.
Outside the gallery is a tower of mirrored balls. He's also installed some huge convex mirrors, like satellite dishes, in various places around the world, to reflect the sky -- people who "hate modern art" have been amazed by them ... they come and watch the clouds moving across - a simple enough experience, but not something you ordinarily do in a busy life, especially in a city.

On Waterloo Bridge

Looking downstream, on a winter's night, in a blowing gale, trying to steady the camera on the railings. You can just about make out St Paul's in the middle, but what gets lost in the blur is the red O X O on the Oxo Tower, which is worth a closer look.
Dramatic lighting transforms the concrete boxes that make up the National Theatre. What's missing is the strings of white lights between the lovely dolphin lampposts along the embankment.

Baubles (recycled)

Once this was a bag full of coffee -The coffee is in a tin now. To make the bracelet, I turned the top over to show the silvery inside, and kept folding it to the bottom of the bag, then cut that off with pinking sheers. The confetti-fish (with holes) are held on via a tag gun (microtags). The bracelet was a bit large so I cut it down to size and held it together with a button on each side, fixed in place, which was a bit tricky to sew on (hint: don't use a thick needle, and use a bradawl to make a hole first). You could simply whip the two edges together.

Doorways

Research for ongoing work on doorways, thresholds, liminality ... first, a compilation from the internet (click on the picture to see it much larger) -One seen nearer home, at the train station on Crouch Hill -
Can this door (on an "ark" at Orford, Suffolk) actually function? -
This "door in flux" is in a community centre in Kensal Rise that is being converted to a mosque -
An enigmatic painting by Rosalind Richards -

Ceramics week 12

From the kiln - the glazed slabs in their, um, glory - they are experiments to try out "ways forward" - using wax resist with a touch of yellow underglaze colour in it; painting with dark glaze; embossing (stamping), bisque firing and then filling in with black slip, sponging off the excess, adding a clear glaze - must try filling in unfired clay with slip, and shaving off the messy top. My favourite effect is the flower-print on the three square slabs - when the slip dried, the slab was cut into four and the pieces were rolled out to different sizes to expand the print -Last week's glazing emerges - views from "outside" -
and "inside" -
and there's also an "in between" - imagine these are resting on a sheet of glass and you're seeing what might be lurking in the basement, or under the floorboards -
The scars on this one are brass tacks under a clear glaze, taken straight from clay to stoneware -
Here the red "dust" has fallen off the window ledge onto the floor - footprints of an intruder?
A view of the hive of activity - some heads and faces are being painted, and some cast body shapes are being prepared for having video projected into them -I threw out some of the pieces that were totally pointless busywork. Trying to get my work into just one tray.

Storytelling with pinchpots? -
The ones at the back are stoneware, as is the dark red in the middle of the front - that's what happens to the terracotta clay (yum).

These "facades" will be fired over the break - I'm trying to focus, in subsequent work, on doorways and thresholds ... but the theme of safety and danger calls to me strongly - maybe they are part of the same thing?
as for example in this little room under the stairs -
Some reflections on making work in ceramics class: After the excitement of picking up the newly fired work, I seem to go into a doldrum of "what next", even when I've written ideas and a workplan in the notebook to prepare for this. This week it was afternoon before I actually got to the clay. A little observation started off the stair-room, namely the way the crank split for the cut bit of the stair - first a smooth cut, then all bumpy when the clay was pulled apart further (which echoes the way the pins make bumpy textures). Like something is trying to get out from underneath the stair. Once I identified that, the piece started coming together, over about an hour, and seemingly without conscious thought. There was quite a bit of "here's the slab, not quite wide enough - should I roll it out more or patch it somewhere or add something somehow" - hence the squished-out edges on the left. Some elements aren't the result of planning, eg the height of the staircase - they used the amount of clay that was on hand at the time.

Using what's on hand also includes using a limited range of stamps, looking for possible ways of using more of those pins, and keeping an eye open for other things that could make useful textures, such as the ring binding of my notebook. I'd categorise myself as an improviser, rather than a good planner. Was it Jane Dunnewold who said in a workshop: "Act like an artist - do something, and then react to that" - I think that's it in a nutshell (the nutshell being your intention/theme).

So the stair piece took just over an hour, and the two doorway pieces maybe another hour, till the end of class (which is five hours not including lunch) - I was just getting into my stride and could have continued for much longer. Diagnosis: slow starter, but gets there in the end?

More little houses

Ideas for "the little houses" are cropping up everywhere. This one is from a charming video made by the New Zealand Book Council and this fire station in Ontario, with its tower and door opening into thin air, comes from Vivian's blog
The theme of "doors that lead only into mid-air" has be rumbling in the back of my mind for years.

O Tannenbaum

They look so ghostly at night...

"A door is a place before another place"

A bit of frottage, a bit of folding, a spot of colour, some lighting....