Your own studio

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Well this is something I get asked a lot, and I mean A LOT, so I thought it would be nice to put the  best tips I can give for your own studio in a small blogpost. As you might know we are still in the middle of moving from our old studio to the new studio and a lot of the mistakes we made with the old studio were not made in the new one of course…. but we made some new mistakes of course as it will never be perfect from the start, so let’s go and make sure you don’t make these mistakes.

 

Let’s start by a few things that are really important:

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Size of the studio
Make sure that you have your seamless on the longest side, meaning you can move away from the seamless as far as possible, this helps you by getting the model on the paper while shooting full body shots. If you have too little space you have to use a wider lens and this means your model will probably hit the sides of the paper.

 

Now what size is perfect?
Actually NO size is perfect.
When you own a small studio you want bigger, if you have a bigger studio you want even bigger, if you have a really large studio you want even larger. I always compare it to the goldfish, if you place it in a bigger bowl it will grow and grow. We photographers do the same 😀 you will always find new gear and new props that you need to store, and that will stand in the way. However height is I think very important, try to get a space that has at least 3.50 mtrs of height otherwise it will be very difficult to get a full body model shot from a lower angle when using seamless, higher is even better.

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Freddie

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For people that know me it’s no secret I’m a huge Queen fan.
Every time we visit London it’s always on the way back that I think “Oh I would have loved to visited Freddie’s house”, it sounds very weird but for me Queen has been a guide line throughout my life, their music has always somehow highlighted important moments. During our marriage for example “teo torriatte” was played (still one of the best Queen songs in my opinion) and on the birth card of our son Brian we used the text “It’s a kind of magic”.

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I’ve seen The Cross, Brian May and Queen with Paul Rodgers live but never Queen with Freddie, actually I even saw Smile live during a christmas party in London many many years ago. So to make a long story short, when teaching the seminar in London last week I realized that I was very close to Freddie’s house and we decided it was this time that we really were going to visit it.

 

Now sometimes you expect a lot, and to be honest I did.
In my opinion Freddie is without any doubt one of the best Rock performers ever and Queen has made it’s mark in music and is still going strong today, just listen to any sports event and you will hear “We will Rock you” or “We are the champions”, and also in modern day music I hear many references to Queen music. When Freddie died the whole wall at his house was covered with texts and letters remembering/honoring Freddie. One would expect that this would have been saved for the future… with that idea I visited the Garden lodge…

 

Much to my “horror” surprise there hardly is anything left. The house cannot be seen from the road (which is not a surprise) the door is however still there but it is clearly cleaned often because even the carved in texts are all gone, next to the door there are plastic plates to prevent people from using graffiti or writing texts on the wall. Now don’t get me wrong, I knew there wouldn’t be an amusement park with Freddie roller coasters, I even knew there was no statue…. but what I did expect was that at least that wall would have been “saved” for future generations. Although I was somewhat disappointed I still felt good that I finally visited the home and of course took some images of what was left, although it was not much it still showed that Queen and Freddie are still very “alive”.

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Some more images from the UK

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Today an album from the images I shot during the time off in the UK.
In the area we stayed there were loads of older churches and graveyards, normally I’m not big on shooting at graveyards but somehow these really old places do give a certain mood that I really like to shoot.

Click on the first image to open the album.

Offer on our instructional Downloads !!

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During the seminars in the UK our DVDs sold out way too quickly so we have a special offer for everyone this week.
If you surf to our shop at www.frankdoorhof.com/shop2 we have a special coupon code that will expire end of this week that will give you a 15% discount on all our instructional downloads (not working on other products).

 

Use the COUPON CODE “UK77” when checking out.

 

All our instructional downloads run over 60 minutes and are JAMPACKED with tips and tricks.
Let’s look at the different options and give you a very quick intro to the products.

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