Home Photo Studio for the Space Challenged

Finding the room in an already cramped home for a studio can be tough. Where or who can you kick out to make room? Which nook will keep anyone else from griping 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 got 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 hard 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 tad 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 we already have in the house?

I now have a well lit area to shoot in with white surfaces all around. I would suggest making sure the walls are white and not a creme or eggshell color. This will be helpful when you begin hanging backdrops on the walls. I use a selection of sheets found at a local discount store to create my variety of backdrops. I purchase the least expensive single bed sheets that were in stock. This gave me a range of color and texture to experiment wtih in my photography. I can hang just about anything on the walls to create a backdrop of any style I want. The shelf along the short wall is out of the way and creates storage for backdrops, small props, shooting supplies, and whatever else I can squeeze into the spot. When I close the door, no studio taking up the room.

I am off to the bedroom now to play in the closet and make some money.