Opening a Photography Studio During a Pandemic
Updated: Jul 1, 2020
After years of learning, hard work, dedication and a love for taking photos of people, I was finally able to open my own studio. Funny story, it just so happened to be about a week before a major pandemic in the entire world. Leave it to me and my luck to sign a lease for a year right before this happened. Well, hey, challenge accepted. My husband's job had him work from home, so as soon as he would finish every day, we would come to the studio and paint and put in flooring. Mind you, we did this all with a very moody 3 year old, whose daycare was also closed during the pandemic.
The original office walls were extremely yellow and if you know anything about photography and light, yellow walls are not what you want to try to work with. Your client will look yellow too because of color casts. So we decided to just paint everything white, plus with the natural light coming in from all the windows it almost makes the room seem like a huge softbox...win win!
The carpet was blue and is commercial grade very thin carpet that has been glued down. I knew if I was going to be using backdrop paper I would need a smoother surface. After doing a little research in some of my Facebook groups, I found that I could cover the carpet with click-lock laminate flooring and the blue carpet becomes your underpad. Is it perfect? No, but it fixed the problem and looks pretty darn good.
Next, the problem was finding affordable shelving for props and equipment. We have some great shelving in our garage that we got at Lowe's and it's not hard to look at, so I decided why not? I got two and they were the answer to the problem. I also found some baskets at Wal Mart that fit perfectly and hold all of my smaller accessories.
I'm really pleased with how it all came out and even more happier that my husband can have the garage back, since I had overtaken it with photography equipment, props and supplies.
Now, to get back to doing what I love, following the CDC business guidelines, of course, and making beautiful, fine art, painterly portraits of you, your children and your families!