Pottery

[chuka_lis]

Helpful site http://www.frogpondpottery.com/
and

how to do a good pictures of art pieces:

Photographing Arts, Crafts & Collectibles: Take Great Digital Photos for Portfolios, Documentation, or Selling on the Web (A Lark Photography Book)

The photographers are able to vary the tone and the values in the backgrounds and coming into the foreground . They're using a seamless backdrop, usually gray. 
It can be anything  that's not reflective or wrinkled, like fabric or formica, but most  people use special photo backdrop paper.  This is really heavy paper  that comes in a lot of different colors on a big roll.  A good photo  store can sell you a chunk off a roll.  If you don't wrinkle it, it  will last years ( about 25 years).
To get that fade from light in the front to dark in the back, you  fasten the paper at the  top to a wall, and let it drape in an easy  curve down to be flat on the table. 
You put the object you're  shooting quite a ways out from the backdrop, and set up your lights  off to the sides so that the piece is in light, and the background is  in shadow.

 

Best to use a light tent.  It's fabric and folds up to store.
The light tent is to diffuse the light so that there are no harsh  glare spots or shadows.  By itself it will not make that graded   background.  That's purely a function of setup.  You can do the  graded background thing with or without a light tent.

You may usie variegated fabric, The other point of the seamless  backdrop is that you don't see a distracting join where the vertical   surface meets the horizontal one.

The object should feel like   it's filling the frame without being crowded.  Certainly the object   should never touch the edge of the frame at any point.  Not should   the  piece look lost and at sea in the middle of an expanse of  backdrop.  The answer really is not too close, not too far, just right.