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:

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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As you probably already know I recently switched from my beloved Canon setup to the Sony A99.
Some people did not get the idea behind this, but let me put it this way… I’m very picky when it comes to dynamic range, color and image quality and when I compared the A99 to the Canon 5DMKIII I could not really think off any reason not to make the switch, now I have to be honest buying all my lenses again is an idea that I did not like and also an idea that scared the heck out of me for the simple reason that I did not know anything about the quality of Minolta glass etc. And this triggered a journey that I will try to show you on the blog and give you some tips and buying advise as we go along.

Old/vintage love
Maybe you already heard/read about it online but there are a lot of people loving old lenses, and according to many the quality is just as good (or better) than the modern lenses. Now this is something that always had me puzzled, of course I know that glass can be incredibly good, I have the experience first hand when I work with the Mamiya RZ67ProII, the lenses for that camera are awesome and beat everything that it on the market now in my opinion, however…. AF has had an incredible boost in recent years so do realize it will always be a tradeoff, on the other hand when we look at pricing this could be something you could life with every easily.

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