An 8:00pm start somewhere near the Millwall football ground in London isn’t everyone’s idea of fun but it was a lovely morning at the trip to the location had been pretty simple.
Having stopped over in London the day before I was ready for the task of setting up the simple studio setting in what was a new to me location. The client confirmed that previously photographers had shot diagonally across the showroom space which made sense to me. The work itself was simple enough, white background, – they were happy with some shadows rather than a 255 white. The space was useable although the 2.2m long sofa was going to need some thought.
I’d taken around 4kw of studio lights, a surfeit of stands and planned a tethered shoot meaning the client could get live visuals of the images straight from the Mac. As ever the lengths of black cloth were invaluable both to kill reflections and to step on in an attempt to keep the paper as clean as possible for as long as possible. It’s worth adding that a pragmatic approach is always going to be useful on a shoot like this.
The items were heavy and small, as well as heavy and large. This is part of the reason why shooting to the Mac helps so much, one doesn’t want to be repositioning the items too much.
The final piece was a really large surface that needed a section photographing at high resolution. It was laid flat on blocks to be shot from above though we could have shot it equally as well standing up.
I tend not to scrimp on equipment for themes shoots, the main boom stand is one of my heavier wheeled stands and I generally use steel c-stands rather than the light alloy kit stands. Lighting heads ranged from 500w to 1500w which are generally powerful enough. Often though the lump of cheap black cloth an the pony-clips are the items that really make the difference though.
Many thanks to Diespeker, Alt Collective,David Fernando and of course Sue Cade who didn’t attempt to escape from the car on the challenging journey home.
Location Studio in London
