Two Kiln Stand Tuesday

I’ve been photographing artifacts as much to practice taking photos with my new camera as to produce publishable images for a volume that we have plans to submit this fall. We also played with a new light cube and some fill lights.

Yesterday we took photos of two kiln stands or spacers. These ceramic rings served to separate objects in the kiln and to allow air (and heat) to circulate more evenly. The allowed the kiln to be stacked more densely.  One had been used a good bit and was over fired and disintegrating. The other looks as fresh as the day it was made.

Of course, I know that these images need scales and so on, but that’s something that we can fix in production (and in both of these images the scale is simply cropped out). The goal

I also messed around a bit with lighting to bring out some details on a Roman lamp disc fragment:

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing, but part of the fun of archaeology is figuring things out as we go.