Monday, February 16, 2009

Home Studio Preparation... Part One - Measuring

The more I shoot portraits, the more I learn I need a space for myself. If you live in Florida or have visited Florida, you know that homes here have very little space for storage, let alone a layout conducive for a home photography studio to shoot stock.

What I am in the process of doing is creating a permanent background holder in my garage. While I will have some items in the garage to move when I want to use my seamless paper, I will not have a stand that needs to be assembled and tore down every time I want to use it. Instead I will have multiple rolls of seamless I can pull down and roll up as needed.

Looking at our garage from the driveway is the first issue, we actually park our vehicles in the garage. This isn't a huge issue, it only takes a moment to back the vehicles out.

The second AND real issues began once I backed out the SUV and looked at the only available wall to mount the seamless roll holders. The garage is 19' long, but some permanent items such as our water heater and door rail along that wall looked to pose a problem and "derail" my project before it got started. After some quick measurements, it would appear the game was back on, I would just need to make a few adjustments to my original idea.

I plan to use 107" (9') seamless on the holders, which needs to mount beyond my water heater (right side of this photo). Mounting the holder to the left of the water heater and gas line will push the opposite end holder behind the garage door rail, ending approx. at the point where the rake handle is in this photo. The rake has now been moved and the other items, mainly lawn maintenance junk is easily movable when it comes time to shoot.

The original idea was to make the mounts large enough to hold at least three rolls of 107" seamless, but as I measured, it would appear that is not going to be possible. Measuring from the wall to the outside portion of the rail was approx. one foot, as shown in this photo to the right.

I have checked the Savage, B&H Photo and Adorama web sites, but they do not list roll diameter, core size or weight on their web site. I e-mailed Savage, but have yet to get a response.

This concludes this portion of the design phase. I will be back soon with Step two once I have an answer to the roll size and weight.


Monday, February 9, 2009

Week 6 - 2009 "Photo-per-Week"

A rare moment as my wife (sans makeup), while practicing off-camera flash techniques, allows me to take her photo and I posted it for my 2009 Photo-per-Week set. See the other weeks photos on my flickr page.