Storage Box Photography Studio
After a winter spent searching fruitlessly for a rental space in which to improve my portrait lighting and product photography, I’ve created my own micro studio behind an anonymous yellow door at my local storage company.
We have a good sized apartment in the Oud West neighbourhood of Amsterdam. We also have 6 year old twins who need their own space. And then we have me, a reformed workaholic, world traveller who works from home, has time on his hands and a renewed passion for photography.
I’ve had an on-off relationship with photography since the early 1980s during which time I’ve made a little money from it, studied it academically and variously shunned it for years at a time.
Over the past seven years, my wife has brought me back various cameras from the business trips she’s made to South Korea. The first was a Samsung NX300M mirrorless camera with a 30mm lens that fits neatly into my coat pocket and which I credit with getting me interested in street photography again.
More recently, she’s been bringing back rangefinder film cameras from the 70s and 80s. Then for my 50th birthday, which happened in the middle of the second Covid 19 lockdown here in the Netherlands, she bought me a Minolta CLE with a Leica 40mm f/2 Summicron lens. Which is some people argue is the best film rangefinder for street photography ever made. I credit it with helping get me through the second lockdown and getting me started developing my own films again after a 15 year gap.
This year, after carrying my CLE around nearly everywhere last year, I’ve decided to take a break from street photography and relearn studio lighting. Initially, it was going to be product photography but I’ve decided to put that off until the autumn and play with portrait lighting first. I’ve studied photography a couple of times, most recently in 2015, in London, and portraits and studio lighting were a big part of those courses but I lacked a passion for it. Preferring landscapes and street photography.
I’m not sure I could have picked a more inopportune time to want a studio. Before Covid we’ve had ample space for the last 10 years for me to have a home studio but we converted it a second office so that we could both comfortable work from home. On top of that, we are having our apartment remodelled this year to make better use of the space: upstairs we have a bathroom the size of a bedroom that we inherited from the previous owners whilst our children share a room; and downstairs we have a tiny kitchen which frustrates our love of cooking.
I was introduced to photography by my maternal grandfather when I was 11 or 12. He took it up as a hobby before he retired in 1982 and he’d take his camera, a Russian made Zenit EM, everywhere. I didn’t share his passion for angling so instead we bonded over our shared love of the countryside and a fascination with photography.
Alongside many of his generation, he died early having barely enjoyed two years of his retirement: weakened by a combination of heavy smoking and the privations of his service in World War II. Upon his death, I inherited an aluminium camera case with his camera and three lenses plus a large softback book that explained the science of exposure and a little of the art of composition.
I was hooked. The Zenit was a companion through school and college until shortly before I went to university. I shot a lot of KodaColor VR and later Kodacolor Gold, mostly landscapes and urban snapshots all of which was developed at the local pharmacist. My grandfather started with colour and back then black and white felt old fashioned to me, so it would be another 10 years before I tried it.
With a home studio out of the question, I spent the first 3 months of the year looking for a suitable studio to rent. As a city, Amsterdam does a good job of encouraging professional artists by helping provide affordable studio space but I’m not a professional artist and nor do I want to contribute to driving up the commercial rental costs for aspiring artists.
Amsterdam also has a healthy supply of WeWork-style affordable, small offices. Unfortunately, the glass walls, canal views and abundance of natural light that are desirable qualities of a modern office space are the opposite of what you want from a photography studio. Windowless offices are hard to come by.
After four months, I solved my problem by renting a 6m² storage locker. We already had a 1.5m² locker full of a jumble of boxes of mementos of the kids growing up and seasonal items like beach tents and Christmas decorations.
I’d been bouncing the possibility around for a couple of months as the other options were going nowhere but it was watching Sean Tucker describe his garage studio setup that really gave me the confidence.
And a passive nudge came from the storage company, who compare the size of their units in terms of garden sheds and garages.
It works quiet well as a solution. I can leave everything setup and undisturbed for days on end which I couldn’t do at home. There is no power, so I can’t use AC powered lights but that’s not a problem given the size of the space. Controlling the ambient light is as easy as opening and closing the door, which it wouldn’t be in WeWork-style office.
It’s not a studio that I can invite people to, which is fine as my goal is to use it to relearn studio lighting techniques and experiment with product photography. True, there isn’t a lot of room but when I need a little extra distance in front or behind the subject, I can move the camera into the doorway or further into the corridor.
I’m also lucky with the location. I have a creative peak in the morning and and the storage company is a ten minute cycle ride from my children’s school. Making it convenient for me to stop in and experiment for an hour after I drop them off.
Finally, when I’m having a creative break I don’t feel bad not visiting. I’ve been able to move all my photography equipment to the storage locker, so the modest additional cost is more than offset by the space that’s been freed up in our apartment.
