A couple days ago I suddenly looked at my camera, and then looked at my gradient background, and at the pile of work I was set to photograph – I picked out a piece & snapped a few images & examined the result. Why am I always shooting in autofocus? I suddenly wondered. Totally out of the blue. Why not switch over to manual, maybe put the camera on a tripod, and try to stop the lens way down & change the film speed?
Well. There is a reason why I usually shoot with the camera mostly choosing its own settings – it's that I really don't know what I'm doing. The auto settings on a digital SLR are made for people like me, who kind of know the result I'm after but don't know, really, what f-stop means. I put the camera down, suddenly. I better figure some of this out, I said. It was August 27, I think. I opened my studio notebook & took a few notes, drew a few diagrams as I read the Wiki entry called Camera Lens and fiddled with the settings on my Canon. Oh – I see – if you push & hold that button you can select which dot is the focus point.
That helps. And...oh, I get it...f numbers get bigger as the aperture gets smaller. Turns out f-stop is a ratio, not a measurement of the size of something. Hmm. I set the camera up & worked some more. I started getting better pictures. Wow, I thought. Why haven't I dug into this before? It's fascinating, and look how much more I can do with my camera.
It all seemed so sudden – the way I was struck by the urge to investigate when, on another day, with a different pile of work I'm supposed to photograph, I just keep it on auto.
I had the same experience recently with ash glazes. In this case I was looking at a great pile of bisqueware just unloaded & ready to be glazed – several days at least worth of dipping, brushing, spraying, pouring. Look at this bucket. Getting low – and hasn't this recipe been troublesome for the last few firings? Those little bubbles...in fired work...let me look back & see about re-formulating. Maybe I shouldn't have added all that ball clay. No – I bet those bubbles are because the glaze melts very early – becomes a liquid coating – while the claybody is still off-gassing. Probably if I backed off on the reduction...ah that's a good thought! Write it down.
A red three-ring binder collects all my notes on glaze formula, along with observations of behavior, for a given glaze, in the firings – going back ten or even fifteen years in some cases. That red binder is sort of the brain of my studio, the conscience. To my surprise, as I opened it...look...it was exactly a year ago that I last re-formulated this glaze. And oh, what does it say there? The bubble problem is I think too heavy reduction too early.
I'm always saying to my students to just work, don't anticipate too much, just discover as you go – observe closely what's happening in the moment. I like to walk in the studio with no idea what I'm going to do that day. I like spontaneity, and I like to think that the new ideas I suddenly have are really new, and are really mine. Then I flip open that red binder and it turns out I already had that idea. Exactly one year ago, in fact. As though instead of spontaneity, which is what a good studio day feels like, really I'm adhering to an underlying pattern. Maybe the changing weather, these new, cool, mornings – are what make me look at that glaze bucket & suddenly want to investigate. Or to suddenly, out of the blue, want to know more about what my camera is doing.
I think I'm having these ideas myself and that they're totally new but...when I really look back – didn't I write something else about my camera down? Back a few months ago? Let me thumb through the book. My studio notebook is a black hard-bound sketchbook, with heavy pages made for drawing. Oh here it is – good. F-stop: focal ratio, I wrote in the older entry, forty or fifty pages ago. Each aperture setting has half the light-gathering area of the previous one. I even made a little sketch and noted that going to a higher f-number is stopping down the lens. Hey wait – look at the date here: 8/26/15. Is that...can that be...exactly a year ago? Only one day off from my big investigation the other day into my camera, my motivation to learn how it works.
