Building a Studio
For 35 years I was a gaffer, lighting movies, commercials, TV shows and marketing films. I built a motion picture lighting rental company with generators, lights, cable and grip trucks. It was fun and took me around the world on lots of adventures. In 1996, after having to move my business 3 times in 5 years I bought a piece of land near my home in Richmond, California so I could have a permanent shop for the gear and never again have to worry about losing a lease. In ‘97 I finished the 3 unit warehouse building and breathed a sigh of relief. A nomad no more.
Fast forward 23 years and the Shop has a real lived in feel. Not much to look at, but I’m never getting kicked out!
Last summer I decided I was done with movies and wanted to devote myself to shooting and printing photographs. I sold my Freightliner Grip Truck, the generators and cable packages, the big lights, and shrunk the whole business down to a van for locations and a grip and lighting package inside for stills. I cleared floor space in what used to be the overfilled storage room and started carving out my first photography studio.
Lets back up a bit. In 2008 I took up the sport of paragliding. I had dreamt of flying when I was young and the incredible feeling of gently lifting up from the ground and riding the air currents under a paraglider was the same magic from my dreams. I started making films about free flight and wound up coproducing the Norcal Free Flight Film Festival, a raucous celebration of paragliding, hang gliding, wing suiting, skydiving and BASE jumping, for the next 6 years. Making films and putting on a film festival is hard work and eventually I decided to simplify, to take up still photography to share the views from my glider, especially at my favorite site along the Pacific shore just south of San Francisco. I went to Looking Glass Photo & Camera in Berkeley with my design brief: I needed a camera small and light enough to shoot for long periods hand held, often with only one hand (I still had to fly the glider) with great image quality, interchangeable lenses (I’m partial to primes) and professional level features. I was steered to the Olympus OMD EM1. I’ll get into the camera in another post. Suffice it to say that it has been a fantastic tool, and has taken everything I’ve thrown at it. Salt air, hard landings, 9 weeks on a motorcycle. It’s a trooper. I’m shooting with the updated the mk2 now.
I had my first shooting day in studio last week - a test run. It was a simple setup - vase with garden flowers. Key light was 3/4 back from a Profoto D2 with a small Chimera, and bounce cards for opposite side fill. A dappled cloth for background and some grip flags to control ambient light (there are 2 skylights) completed the setup. The tungsten fresnel was mainly to brighten things up for good focus. It’s a blessing to have the movie lighting and grip gear to finesse the look. I’m working on a tethering rig, but for now its just the eyepiece and flip out screen as a monitor.
The studio is going to be a work in progress for awhile. In future posts I’ll show the improvements, get into my camera, lenses, photo travel, digital processing, printing, and who knows what else. If you have questions, comments, or anything you want explored - gear, techniques, lighting - please chime in. I’d love to hear from you.
Eric
