Building a photo studio (in our basement).
'Oh yeah,' I told Katie as I came upstairs after firing off the first test shots in my new studio, 'this will be a total time-suck.' In a fun way.
Now that I'm kicking off a creative agency and getting back into photography for real, I thought it'd be good to put together a photo studio in our basement. Traveling and being outdoors to shoot is fun and all. It's also time-consuming as well as a crowded space. It seems much less glamorous to retreat to a dark cave and power up artificial lights.
Although, as I've quickly been reminded from my years working at REI's photo studio, it's an absolute blast.
Heck, just touching up the studio files brought back a flood of fond memories from those days at REI. Fun aside, the benefits of providing a product photography service to clients has a bunch of upsides:
- Zero travel (well, down a flight of stairs)
- Flexibility in when I work (no coordinating with models or other crews)
- Maybe surprisingly, significantly more creativity (there's not much I can do about the direction or intensity of the sun)
The process of putting together a studio setup is really quite simple. In our gear room, we already had a table (coincidentally, from my days working in a Kodak film lab). All I had to do was throw together a ceiling mount on which to put a strobe. With a scrap of 2x6 lumber, a couple pieces of galvanized pipe, and some leftover lag bolts I had the thing installed and the light mounted.
I already had all the stands and lights I needed so I quickly set up a backdrop on that old Kodak table.
Along with a grey seamless, I had picked up the black one at Hobby Lobby a while ago. I'll need to step up to Savage seamless (too much glare on that supposedly-flat paper) and beef up my color options as well as sizes. I'm building another set in the garage for shooting full-body and larger products (think tents and bicycles). Like this guy's setup:
Yep, he's got the floor-to-ceiling seamless backdrop going on. Also, a 4x5 view camera. Now that's pro!
With a few lights, a variety of backdrops, and some other simple tools, I'll be able to hole myself up in the basement and endlessly create. After only a couple hours messing around and getting things setup in that creative time-suck, I knew that yep, this is going to be fun.
(When I turned off the studio lights I noticed that cool shaft of light coming from the door I had left cracked open)
(More on the drone in an upcoming post… )
