Just going through pictures from this past summer, and found these from the Fairmount Art Crawl. We ran into our neighbors, Sandi and Neil, who are the owners of Neighborhood Potters, a beautiful little pottery studio on Fairmount Ave. They were giving a demonstration, and it was really mesmerizing to watch. They were so precise and meticulous with every tiny movement of their hands.

Processed using Kodak Ektar 25 from VSCO Film 07

I wanted to create an image that showed how still and precisely Neil was holding his hands, while still capturing the movement of the pottery wheel, and the changes happening to the pot. I was zoomed up pretty good (180mm), so I knew my shutter speed should be at least faster than 1/200th second in order to minimize blur from camera shake. The wheel was spinning pretty fast, so fortunately, at 1/200th of a second, I was able to freeze his hands, minimize blur from shaking, and still get a little bit of the movement from the wheel.

Processed with Kodak E200 from VSCO Film 04

After taking a bunch of pictures of these potters, I guess I was was a bit fixated on hands, because when I turned the corner and saw a jazz band playing, the first thing I though was “hey, let’s take more pictures of hands!”

Processed using the Kodak Elite 50 preset from VSCO Film 07

I zoomed in even a bit more on my telephoto lens for this shot (250mm) because I wanted to compress the depth the photo and make the bass really fill the entire frame from corner to corner with its deep-red color. I got lucky with very soft, overcast lighting that allowed me to really push it during processing to make it rich and lively, but still quite even & natural.