My photo studio

A couple of people have asked me how I photograph my work, so I thought I’d spend some time describing my setup. I built a portable studio kit for about $200, not counting the cost of the camera and camera tripod. It also fits on a shelf in my studio closet when I’m not using it, so I’m not always tripping all over everything.

Here’s what it looks like folded up and ready for storage:

And this is what it looks like when I’m using it:
How I built it:
Glass has strong reflected and transmitted qualities–that’s why we like it so much–but the combination makes it difficult to photograph, particularly if it’s primarily clear (like my Shards series). It’s prone to glare and hotspots, and you must mix just the right balance of reflectance and transmission to make it look like glass.

The easiest way to photograph glass, turns out, is to make sure that the light falling on it is diffused first. That way you get your primary illumination right, without hotspots, and you’re freed up to back- or under-light the piece as needed to bring in some transparency.

When I first started photographing glass I built my own low-cost light tent. I found a laundry sorting rack at Container Store, set an old glass shelf on the sorting bins, and then taped big sheets of white vellum to form the tent and a seamless backdrop for the glass. Worked like a charm–vellum is about the best light diffuser I know–but one day one of the lights dipped a little too close to the vellum “roof” and the whole thing caught fire. (Burning vellum, by the way, is an absolutely stinky experience.)

So…I went looking for something a little less jury-rigged and, er, flammable, and found the foldable nylon “studio in a box” kits. There are several available on e-Bay, ranging in price from about $39 to $150. I paid $69 for mine, a 30×30x30 cube that came with a white nylon drape (which I don’t use) and carrying kit.

Setup is simple–you untwist the metal hoop frame, the cube pops open, you attach your backdrop inside and stick the velcro’d “door” on the front. The “door” has a slit in the center for your camera lens, so light is diffused evenly on all six sides. You simply position your lights outside, set up your tripod, and start shooting. I set mine up on my glass dining table, which allows me to position lights from underneath, too.

I paid about $30 for an old set of photographer lights on e-Bay–came with two light stands, four lights (three the old-fashion spotlight type and one big halogen overhead light), and a couple extra extension arms. I paid another $20 for an old foot-operated spotlight that sits in a can under the tent, for when I want the piece to glow from inside.

The light stands were kinda flimsy, and didn’t have enough extension to reach out into the center of the tent, so I also bought a sturdy lightstand and extension arm from the local camera shop for about $60. Probably could have found it cheaper on e-Bay, but I didn’t want to wait.

Finally, I looked for seamless paper rolls but thought they were too expensive. So I went to the fabric store and bought heavy white and black silk georgette, a yard of each. Works beautifully to both diffuse and soften the background, and because it’s silk the dust slides off. The tent has two little loops on top for fastening the fabric.

Setup takes about 15 minutes–longer if I have to iron wrinkles out of my backdrops.

The hardest thing (I think) about using the tent is figuring out how to position the glass. I use a cheap wine goblet, upside down, as a stand–most of my pieces balance on the goblet foot (you can see it in the second picture) and since the goblet is transparent it’s either invisible or relatively easy to photoshop out of the image. For bigger pieces I have a square glass vase and a lot of lucite cubes and wedges. I just found a used matte black mini-tripod that holds a gazillion different positions and I’m going to try and glue on a lucite base to the mounting head. The idea is that I can use museum gel or something on the base, set the glass on it, and get exactly the position I want. We’ll see…

That’s about all there is to it. I generally save up a couple months’ worth of pieces before I get out the studio. Probably if I had a permanent setup I’d shoot images more frequently and in smaller batches, but so far it hasn’t really been worth it.

BTW, here’s the result of the piece I was photographing in the picture above. Considering that it’s plain old clear (and frosted) glass, I think it came out pretty well.

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