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Comment by Brian Dean on February 12, 2014 at 4:28pm

George, I broke down and read my camera manual and figured out what I was doing wrong with my focus problem. Amazing what actually reading the manual will do. I have just uploaded high resolution versions of the photos I uploaded a couple days ago and amazingly they are in focus and look good. Enjoy

Comment by George Lewter on February 12, 2014 at 11:25am

Here are a couple of suggestions. Try printing a black and white grid of 1/2" squares on piece of paper and cut out so it's about 3" square. If your camera has single point autofocus, set for that, if not center weighted focus (normal mode on a lot of cameras). Lay the paper in your piece where you want the sharpest focus, center the viewfinder on the paper, half push your shutter release to get the focus. While continuing to hold the shutter release half-way, remove the paper and push the shutter release button the rest of the way for the shot. This should get you good focus.  Macro or super macro modes will let you move in closer, but depth of field (focus) will be shorter, resulting in only part of your piece being in focus. A tripod or mini-pod can be a big help. Noise is worst in low light situations where the flash is not being used. 

If the original picture is out of focus, details are already lost, sharpening will add some crispness to lines between contrasting areas, but will not bring back subtle detail within an area.

Comment by Brian Dean on February 12, 2014 at 4:34am

George, the resolution is not the issue. I take the photos at a very high resolution but have had trouble figuring out how to get very crisp and sharply detailed images. Everything is kind of fuzzy with the focusing. It's a small camera with a small LCD screen so difficult to manually focus. So, end up doing a sharpening filter and that adds noise. Guess I need to play around more with my camera to get it all figured out. Sigh... Another thing I have to master as if there weren't enough things already.  I did however, figure out my hair pulling pin hole problem with this batch though. It was the clay! B-Mix sucks with glazes I use and slow cooling cycles. Went to porcelain and pinholes went away pretty much. Tried three different porcelains and all three were much, much better than the B-Mix I've been using. Porcelain is twice as expensive but when you are taking a hammer to 2 out of 3 pots due to pinholes not that expensive really.

Comment by George Lewter on February 11, 2014 at 9:34pm

More beautiful work as we have come to expect from Brian. Wish the photos were higher resolution with less noise.