Photo Studio

Finding the room in an already cramped home for a photo studio can be hard. Where or who can you kick out to make room? Which nook will keep anyone else from complaining about all the stuff? Then you have to deal with storage for all your studio items. The problems just keep compounding.

The real question is, do you have a spare closet or one filled with junk? To create a light friendly shooting space, I started playing around the house with locations. In my frustration, I began reorganizing a junk closet when I noticed something -- NO SHADOWS! No matter where I looked in the closet I didn't have any shadows. The one ceiling lamp was a bit dim but not that dim. Ingenuity struck like a baseball bat... OK not that tough but still. I removed the conventional bulb and replaced it with an energy efficient halogen from the hardware store. This pushed my 60 watts to up over 200, with the expense of less than a 60 watt bulb in energy use. Now I had plenty of light (soft at that), nice color temp., and still NO SHADOWS.

The close in white walls bounce the light nicely so as to not create shadows on anything that I am shooting. The dimensions of the shooting area are a bit claustrophobic at 3 feet by 4 feet and just over 8 feet high. These cramped quarters are large enough to even photograph models by placing the camera along the plane of the doorway to shoot. You will see many photographers who create this tight space to work with the light better through drops, plaster boards, and foam boards. Why not use what you already have in the house?