Studio
The studio and its light
Ninety square metres of a 1930s knitting mill, hired by the half or full day, lit by the soft southern glass the old machinists once worked under.
The studio is the back half of the floor, the other side of the wall I built the week I signed the lease. Ninety square metres, a four metre ceiling, and one long run of factory glazing that is the entire reason I took a 1930s building with no heating.
People hire it for the light, so I should be honest about where it comes from: the shorthand I use everywhere else on this site is wrong.
North light and the southern hemisphere
I call it a north-lit studio on the rest of the site, because that is the phrase photographers use. North light means soft, even, indirect daylight with no hard sun in it, the light painters chased in their studios for two hundred years. The catch is that those studios were in the northern hemisphere, where the sun sits in the southern sky, so a north-facing window never catches it directly.
Collingwood is at thirty-seven degrees south. Here the sun tracks across the northern sky, which is why the passive-design guides tell you to face the living room north for winter sun. A north-facing window takes direct sun most of the day; the soft, unchanging light you want on a face or a bottle comes from the south.
The people who built the mill understood this. The roof is a sawtooth, its glazed teeth facing south, away from the equator, so the machinists below never had sun in their eyes. That is the light I shoot by. The tall windows down the long wall do face north, and from about two they throw hard sun across the floor, lovely if you want it and behind blackout blinds in thirty seconds if you don’t. I keep the label so people find the page. It is south light, and it is the better light.
The room
The floor is polished concrete, not precious; you can drag a C-stand across it without anyone wincing. Two walls are the original brick, left as they were. The third is plaster, painted a mid grey I mixed too dark on the first go and kept. Nothing hangs on any of them, because a blank wall is the point of a studio.
In the far corner there is a change area with a curtain, a mirror, a rail and a chair, because getting changed in a café toilet is nobody’s idea of a good shoot. There is a kettle, decent tea and a small fridge, and the café is fifteen steps through the wall, open until three.
What comes with it, and what to bring
The hire includes two Profoto B10 heads, a 1.5 metre octabox, a strip box, three C-stands and a boom, and a tethering bench with power. Three paper rolls sit on a wall system, white, mid grey and black, and you pay for what you pull down and mark: a fresh drop of white is $30, roughly what the roll costs me. A second strobe head is $40 for the booking.
Bring your own camera, lenses, laptop and cards; I don’t hire those and I won’t lend mine. If you are shooting product, bring more of everything than you think you need, because the nearest replacement is a tram ride away.
Half days, full days and the deposit
Two rates, and they have not moved in two years.
| Hire | Hours | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Half day | Four hours | A$220 |
| Full day | Eight hours | A$380 |
| Second strobe head | Per booking | A$40 |
Both include GST, the room to yourself, and me nowhere near you unless you have booked me too. A half day is a real four hours, not four hours if the person before you runs over, because I don’t stack the changeover.
To hold a date I take a $100 deposit that comes off the balance, the rest due on the day by card or transfer. Move the booking with more than forty-eight hours’ notice and the deposit moves with it; cancel inside forty-eight hours and I keep it, because by then I have turned other people away. You get a plain confirmation, no app to download and no account to make.
The rules, and the booking that wrote them
For a long time there were no rules, just the room and a key. Then a band hired it, brought a haze machine the size of a beer keg, ran it full, and set off the smoke detectors, which in a shared 1930s building are wired to the same panel as the café. The brigade came, and forty people eating breakfast were moved onto the footpath in the rain. The band got a very atmospheric photo.
So: no haze, fog or smoke machines of any kind, because the alarm is not mine to isolate. No open flame, no confetti cannons. Nothing screwed, nailed or hard-taped to the brick. Music that does not carry through the wall to people trying to enjoy a flat white. And out by your end time, because the person after you booked their four hours too.