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Writer's pictureHannah Villegas

Behind The Scenes: Ceramics Raku Shoot

Updated: Jun 1, 2023

I completed this photoshoot with a partner, my friend Joan, and I had to learn how to photograph the ceramics artwork. Photographing ceramic artwork is a challenge because the simplicity of the artwork can be hard to capture especially due to having to work with glossy surfaces and the glares it can produce when light hits it. The other challenge is that we wanted to capture the accurate colors and textures of the ceramic artworks while also creating an image that is unique.


It was both our first time so at first getting the lighting and angles right were tricky as well as our settings we had to adjust our our shutter speed a couple times and we had to adjust our iso quite often depending on the colors of the ceramic and the lighting we used. For many of our photos our settings were: F/5.0 , ISO 1600-3200 , and Shutter Speed of 1/160


We also wanted to celebrate this particular style of ceramics because My photo Teacher, Miss Ricketts said it was special and called Raku. Raku is an ancient Japanese ceramics technique which is the process of glazed ceramics taken from the kiln when they are still glowing red hot, and are then placed in sawdust or newspaper. To honor the importance of the fire in this process, we chose to use a red light on the left and 2 big soft boxes as our key light. We also used some reflectors to bounce some light back into the shadows.


It was a little tricky but I was happy with the end results, we were on a bit of a time crunch but once we knew the look we wanted and how to set that up we were able to get it down pretty quickly. We had set the ceramic on a wooden board with a long poster paper backdrop which had a nice cream sand color, a nice neutrality with the red light.

Checkout my instagram, for more photoshoots like this and more! @darlingphotographyy18





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