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I just purchased a 24" tabletop photo studio kit to help me with my Etsy site, only to find that the included lights are too dim for even a sunny afternoon in a Tillamook, Oregon pottery studio. I plan to order better lights, and this time I want to be SURE they'll be bright enough for me to showcase my work. I've been pottering for over a decade, but this is the first time I've been serious about photographing/ selling my work, so any and all feedback would be very much appreciated. Here's the studio I purchased: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07RDQ99HY/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1 And here are some of the lighting kits I'm considering (please speak up if you have suggestions other than these!!): https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07VDNHYX7/?coliid=I2JBRET66N5NOD&colid=IMX9TIP77PUR&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00L5TGT82/?coliid=I2RTJ8XYAODGQW&colid=IMX9TIP77PUR&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07ZYFBBFF/?coliid=I3U2ESH30XLYGM&colid=IMX9TIP77PUR&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07HHVDW1V/?coliid=I37429CKMLP92K&colid=IMX9TIP77PUR&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07BF81K3B/?coliid=I336LP85YXQ1N4&colid=IMX9TIP77PUR&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it Thank you in advance for sharing your wisdom! -Kristina Vatne

Over the weekend, I made the rounds of the Tennessee Craft fair in Nashville, Tennessee. There were a LOT of clay artist & potters exhibiting there and all-in-all the quality is up from some less-than-stellar previous years. I did get at chance to chat with Helene Fielder at her booth. I watched her on Facebook as she tackled a Summer of 50 Teapots project. At the fair, several of those amazing teapots were featured (and for sale). What shocked me, however, was the scale of these creations. Take a look at this image, and guess how tall this piece is? Here is my question: What are best practices to give buyers a sense of size (scale) of work displayed in pictures...(not just in the description)? OK (spoiler alert). The piece displayed in the picture (above) is approximately 20" tall. Are there clues in the image that would help a shopper understand that? Paul:)

I've been doing a lot of photography here lately (a grim necessity if you have an Etsy shop.) One of the recommendations for the photos used in the shop is for a close-up of some detail. At first I tried to get close to the pot to take these, but then I realized that my camera has so much resolution available that it worked a lot better to just zoom into a shot of the whole pot until I found something good. In the course of this I discovered that you could see stuff in the glaze surface that wasn't obvious to the naked eye, and I became somewhat obsessed with looking at these extreme closeups. I even wrote a blog post about them a day of two ago, and it occurred to me that maybe some folks here would find the idea interesting. Here are some examples: