AdoramaTV presents 'Exploring Photography' with Mark Wallace.
Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of 'Exploring Photography' right here on AdoramaTV,
brought to you by Adorama, the camera store that has everything for
photographers, especially photographers like Norm Beer and Norm has been so
gracious to let me show you something that i think is pretty fascinating. It's
your small studio. Now this used to be a two car garage essentially and you've converted
this to be a full-fledged professional studio
absolutely.
And the cool thing about this is a lot of people have been writing to me saying hey I've got a small
space, a room in my house, maybe a garage, sort of tuff shed, something like that.
How do you make that into a studio space and the thing that I love about this is
you've done a lot of really cool things to optimize every inch of this
garage and so that's what this episode is about. We're going to show you how
Norm has optimized the space to do some really cool things including
some really awesome things with the ceiling, some storage where the garage is... anyway I
want you to tell me about it so let's first talk about this background and all
these lights that you have up here. how you've done it. Let's start with a
background, now what is this this?
This is just a three roller system and we've got
white, grey and black interchangeable... takes just seconds to switch out and
behind it is a dead flat white wall as well so if I don't want that I can just use
that which works out great
So all kinds, you can put any colour you want. This is a nine foot
rolls, basically what these are?
Yeah and I can actually go wider but it set for nine right now.
Alright, now something that I think is really cool is you have these lights and
flags and stuff that seem to be sort of floating in mid-air because there's no stands underneath these
It's magic! It's photography magic.
How is that happening? Tell us about what you've done to the ceiling here.
These are some struts that I picked up at Home Depot and I was looking to find a
solution and found these and thought, you know what, this will be great. It was much
less expensive, believe it or not, than that angle iron and these hold a
tremendous amount of weight I mean we could hang off of these no problem and
nothing is moving.
So these are bolted into the studs is that right?
They're bolted into the rafters.
OK and what are these things called? If somebody's going to buy them, what are they called?
They're a Superstrut.
A Superstrut.
Superstrut.
Alright and then how do you mount this stuff to your superstrut? It's got a channel basically, right?
Yeah there's a channel and there's some parts that interlock. They lock up
in there and they're bolted and the nice thing is that that way we can get our
safety cables and nothing can fall, so even if we do have something happen,
the lights aren't coming down on a client's
They're just going to sort of dangle there?
They're going to just dangle, yeah exactly and on these we have the grip pads and we've got some magic arms
and they hold everything in place.
So this is all Avenger, Kupo, Manfrotto?
All of it.
Ok is your basic stuff and so you can just bolt, you clamp that onto a bolt
and then that's going to support quite a bit of weight. Now you've also over here, on this
side, created sort of a storage area for your light stands and that kind of stuff
using a similar system.
You can mount C stands, grip arms, arms you name it. It can all mount
right there. It's out of the way, it's off the floor and it actually, you know,
it looks sexy
and to make this look nice and look sexy like you call it you got also hung
rods to put curtains up essentially.
Yeah and that is just half inch pipe, threaded
pipe, cut to the right size, mounted to the same
ceiling joists, and again I just got these little Home Depot curtain hangers and
the curtains and they're interchangeable. I can change it any color I want so if I
need to get a color cast for some reason or if I want a different background I can just
turn and shoot up against that and make it totally flexible.
OK, well let's talk about this area over here because you've got a bunch SKB cases you've got a
bunch of soft box, you've got some tether tools equipment over here so let's take
a look at how you've organized your storage for the big stuff, and again take
a closer look at these curtains and then after we do that let's take another look
at your storage over here. So let's do that next. Alright so now we're here...this
is sort of the garage, this is where the garage door would open and cars would
normally park but you've converted this to some storage with these SKB cases, is that what these guys are?
Yeah these are SKB cases, but to clarify something the garage door
still opens, ok, and I can still get two cars in here if I had to.
If you had to, ok, still functioning garage.
It's still functioning so I didn't take any functionality out of it, which is great.
Yes these are SKB cases. These are amazing cases all of my big gear gets
stored really nicely and here when I'm going and shooting events it's really nice and
compact. They're super sturdy
So you just pull these out as you need?
Pull it out as I need it, everything. I know what's what. It's all marked.
I did see this. This is sort of a trick that I liked. Tell me about what this guy is and what it does.
Well this is actually a
repurposed flight drug box case
Ok because you used to be a...
flight paramedic and fire fighter
Grids are always damaged. I don't know how many times I've picked up a grid especially a 5 or a 10
and you can't see through it all. In here, it stores them really nice, they're
protected, as long as you don't leave it open and drop it you're totally safe.
So if you don't have a flight case like this guy you can just use, you know, anything that's made by Tenba or SKB,
just a case that's going to keep your stuff separate from being dropped and smashed and all that kind of stuff
You know, people have said 'Oh that takes up a
lot of room' but the insurance on it for those grids is worth it.
Yeah, because you don't want to show up to shoot and have... your money comes all smashed up and no good.
So do that, it's an awesome trick and then this over here I noticed you have one of
my favorite things, a tether table on a rolling stand with a little cup holder.
With the famous Mark Wallace cup holder
That's right. To hold all your coffee.
Exactly!
Now so what do you use? It
seems, like, in a small studio this would be like high on the list of things that
you'd want, just so you'd have a place to put all your pocket wizards, your laptop, all that kind of stuff.
Oh absolutely, it's essential. I really do need it.
I use it all the time. I'm actually thinking about getting another one so
that I can have a separate table just for these items and then for the laptop.
Right, now, I've got, I have to say, I have about in my studio, I think we have like
six or seven of these. We have them all over the place, because not only do
we have laptops on them but we also keep things like our light meters, we keep
spare parts and if we were using grids we'd stick that on there, sometimes we have shot lists
we put iPads. Gray cards that fall off!
All that stuff, cables and the nice thing about having a rolling
stand is you can just move them out of the way if you need to.
Exactly. Alright, enough of this stuff. I think you get the idea. Let's
take a look at the other wall which is your storage system that you created for
your stands and all the hangings stuff.Well this is something I think is one of the
best ideas I've seen in a small studio. Essentially you have created your own
custom storage space so how does this work out?
Well, what I did was I took some OSB, mounted it to the wall so that it's in the studs and I can
mount anything anywhere in this and it's going to be solid. So I took the leftover
Superstrut, mounted it and the Superstrut is actually into the studs at the same time.
Alright, so pretty darn solid.
Very solid and, yeah, just got different sized bolts and that's
the nice thing with the Superstrut is you can put any size
bolt in there you really want, and be able to mount anything, essentially.
Yeah so you're holding your boom
arms, you're holding your bases, you're holding grip, you're holding booms,
cables, all kinds of stuff on here and it's really easy to pull something off
and use it in the studio so it's a fantastic idea. Norm this has been really
informative for me and I think for a lot of people now you actually had a large
studio in Phoenix before you moved up here to Eugene, Oregon is that right?
I did. I had a fine, big studio down there.
So massive, and so everything is in this space?
Everything is in this space, tucked away.
And usable. So I think if Norm can do it, I think
anybody can do it and this will work with speedlights or studio strobes or pretty
much anything that you can bring into a space like this.
Well, you know, what we've done is for more information about some of the
different boxes and tools and stands and stuff that Norm is using, I have
included links to those things in the description of this video so check that
out and also for more small studio tips and for lighting setups in shooting and
all that kind of stuff, check out the Adorama Learning Center. It's absolutely
free and don't forget to subscribe to AdoramaTV,
because it's free and we don't want you to miss a single episode but thanks Norm
and thank you for joining us and we'll see you again next time.
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