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The list
Somebody who books the room and somebody who works in it want completely different mail from a studio. Tell us which you are and we will only send the half that is any use to you.
Photography & video
None of this is about the room being good. It is the handful of decisions that decide whether a day here produces what you came for, written against the bodies, lenses and microphones that are on the shelf.
Three lenses live here and they do not fit the same body. The zoom is Sony FE and goes on the A7 III; the fifty and the macro are Canon EF and go on the 5D Mark IV. Which body you are shooting decides which lenses you have.
Focal length is not zoom. It decides how much of the room sits behind your subject and how a face is drawn. Wide pushes the background away and enlarges whatever is nearest the lens — generous to a room, unkind to a nose. Long flattens the face and compresses the background into a soft band behind it, which is why portraits are shot long and interiors are shot wide.
On a 4 × 3 metre cyclorama you have about three metres of depth, and that is the real limit at the long end: at 70mm a half-length figure frames comfortably, and much past that you are backing into the opposite wall. The room picks the lens as much as the subject does.
For product, distance is what keeps a bottle looking like a bottle. Close with a wide lens and the label bows outwards; stand back and go long and the shape stays true. The macro is for the frames where texture is the subject rather than a quality of it — thread, grain, condensation, the face of a watch.
The lens most of the day happens on. Lookbooks, half-length, groups, and anything where the framing changes faster than you could change lenses.
Close to how an eye sees. Honest proportions on a face, and the widest aperture here when you want the background to fall away.
Detail. Life-size at its closest focus, which is a different kind of picture rather than a closer one.
Triggers for Sony, Nikon and Canon are here and in the room price, so your own body fires our lights. Bring cards and batteries.
They are shot differently and they are not interchangeable. Deciding which the day is for before it starts is what stops it producing a hundred frames nobody can use.
A shop frame has a job: the product, evenly lit, square to the camera, on a white that cuts out cleanly, at the proportions the platform will crop to. It is repetitive on purpose. Consistency across sixty products matters more than any single one being beautiful — a grid where every third picture is lit differently reads as a shop that is not paying attention.
A campaign frame has the opposite job. It is one image that has to make somebody stop, and whatever makes it do that — a hard shadow, an odd crop, a colour that is nowhere on the product — is the point. You will shoot far fewer and spend far longer on each.
The cyclorama serves both, but not in the same session. Lit flat it gives the clean white a shop needs; lit from one side it gives a campaign its shadow. Moving between the two is a relight, which is why a day asked to do both does noticeably less of each.
Egypt runs on 50Hz mains. Most of the footage people arrive worried about — the bands rolling up the frame, the flicker nobody can see with their eyes — comes from that one fact.
A camera does not see light as continuous; it samples it. If a light is pulsing fifty times a second while the sensor reads at a rate that does not divide into fifty, the mismatch shows up as bands moving through the frame. The American defaults every camera ships with — 30 or 60 frames a second at a 1/60 shutter — are exactly the ones that do not divide into it.
The second rule is older and unrelated: a shutter at roughly double the frame rate. 25fps wants 1/50, 50fps wants 1/100. Slower and movement smears; faster and it strobes into something that looks like a news broadcast. Conveniently, the shutter speeds that look right at 25 and 50 are the same ones that do not band on 50Hz mains.
If you still see banding with the settings right, the cause is a light rather than the camera. Switch off the room lights and the overheads and shoot on the studio heads alone — they are the ones that were chosen for this.
25 or 50 frames a second, shutter 1/50 or 1/100. Those are the settings that do not fight the mains.
Nobody remarks on good sound. Everybody notices bad sound, and they stop watching before they could tell you why.
A microphone on a camera is three or four metres from the person speaking, so it records the room far more than the voice. A lavalier is twenty centimetres from a mouth, so the voice arrives far louder than everything around it. That distance, and almost nothing else, is the difference between footage that sounds made and footage that sounds filmed on a phone.
A studio is a room and not a booth. Hard walls and a hard floor return the voice to the microphone a few milliseconds late, which is the hollow sound that cannot be taken out afterwards. Keeping whoever is talking off the cyclorama and away from a bare wall does more for the recording than any setting on the camera.
Record a few seconds of the room with nobody speaking before you start. It costs nothing, and it hands whoever edits it a sample of the exact noise to subtract.
Wireless lavalier. Clips to a collar and transmits to the camera. This is the one for anybody talking on film.
A USB desk microphone. For voiceover, a podcast or anything recorded sitting still — not for somebody moving around the floor.
Most briefs now want both, and the days that manage both badly nearly all fail the same way: the lighting gets rebuilt in the middle of them.
Flash and continuous light are different things, and a set lit for one is not lit for the other. Shoot stills on the strobes all morning and plan to film in the afternoon, and the afternoon opens with a relight — an hour of a day you paid for, spent moving stands.
The way round it is to light the set once with continuous light, which both kinds of camera can use, and take the trade: less power than the strobes, so a wider aperture and a higher ISO on the stills. The Godox FV150 avoids even that trade by being both — an LED while you film and a flash when you shoot.
Shoot vertical deliberately rather than cropping to it afterwards. A nine-by-sixteen crop out of a horizontal frame throws away two thirds of what you lit, and the composition that survives the crop is almost never the one you set up.
If reels are part of the brief, say so when you book. The lights go up differently.
Not sure what fits into a day?
Tell us what you are shooting and we will say what fits into a half day and what does not — before you book it rather than after.