Having signed up to show two theme panels of printed images at Yateley Camera Club's annual expo 2022, and then spent most of the remaining time working on Ghosts of the Tide, showcasing some of my shell collection, I found myself at the eleventh hour still with no idea what to do for my other submission. It then occurred to me out of the blue to make use of another of my collections, a range of ceramic and wooden vessels which I've been acquiring over the last few years either as gifts or from craft shows; many of these share a bluey-green colour tone which would help the resulting photos to cohere as a set.
Since a pot or bowl sitting on a shelf wouldn't make a particularly interesting image, I chose instead to photograph them held in my hand in a variety of postures, hence the title Vessel & Hand. Everything was planned so that there would be six images (the minimum required for an exhibition theme panel) and they would sit together in visually balancing pairs. Three are left-handed, three are right-handed. Since I was working solo, each shot had to be taken holding the chosen vessel in one hand while simultaneously trying to wield the remote shutter release with the other - which, depending on the angles involved, was sometimes easier said than done!
This would prove to be my penultimate camera club theme print panel (followed by Garden Textures in 2023), and out of the eventual five I would probably rank Vessel & Hand as my most artistically successful. It was certainly the most statistically successful, as I also entered some of the pictures individually to open competition rounds where two of them were awarded top marks - which I only ever received for one other image during my five years in the club.
The little cyan-and-bronze pot featured in the first photo is the first of these vessels I acquired, and this isn't the first time it's made an appearance in my work - it can also be seen in a couple of Arbitrary Stopframe videos.
