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Category: Studio Tools
Fire Extinguisher
Having recently replaced the batteries in my smoke alarms, a twice-yearly ritual, I thought I would give the spotlight to this essential tool for any photography studio, whether your photography workspace is in a city loft or a suburban basement. It is a no-brainer to store a fire extinguisher where it can be grabbed in [...]
Paper Towels and Glass Cleaner
This irreverent dynamic duo may seem obvious, but I can’t stress enough that you need to have these tools on hand in the studio at all times. Other than plain water, glass cleaner makes for a gentle general-purpose cleaner that works on many surfaces. Besides cleaning anything made from glass, you may need glass cleaner [...]
Acetone and Heptane
The active ingredient in nail polish remover is acetone. Photographers need to keep some acetone in the studio largely to solve one of the problems mentioned previously— tape residue. Acetone will dissolve most types of tape residue, greasy film, or grime, paint, writing from markers, and so forth. It is fine to use on most [...]
Staple Gun
A staple gun can be a quick way to hold something together in the studio when you don’t want to use tape or glue and want a semipermanent solution. Notice I use “semipermanent” frequently to describe goals in the photo studio. That’s because you need permanence while setting up for and producing your photographs, but [...]
Duct Tape
I mentioned this post to a photographer friend and he blurted out, “Oh, things like duct tape!” I’m not surprised that duct tape was the first irreverent tool to come to mind because it is something that is by definition designed for a purpose far from anything photographic. Regardless of the name given to this [...]
Packing Tape
Exceptionally strong, packing tape can be a permanent solution to holding together parts of a studio set, or holding together paper elements such as background paper or cardboard reflectors. In fact, this tape bonds so tightly, you wouldn’t want to use it on anything made out of paper that you would care became damaged if [...]
White Paper Tape
Tape is an absolutely essential irreverent photo tool and comes in a variety of useful materials with varying amounts of stickiness and dispensing ability. I’m not referring to traditional gaffer’s tape, which, while an essential tool in any photo studio, is hardly irreverent. Other types of tape are nontraditional and you may think don’t have [...]
Hot Glue
The hot glue gun is an essential irreverent photo tool for every photographer’s toolkit. In fact, just the ability to bond things together is very important for photography. Photographers should have a variety of glues and tapes in their tool chest and hot glue is just one of them. A special advantage of hot glue [...]
Paint Cans
Shooting down at something in the studio is especially difficult. You may have to get up on a ladder and crane your neck to see through the camera, an angle that is hardly comfortable. You might especially need to light whatever you are shooting down onto, whether it is a person, a product, or a [...]
Gatorboard
Somewhere along my journey as a professional photographer I was introduced to gator-board, which goes by the brand name Gatorfoam. If you call up your local art supply store or do a web search for gatorboard, you’ll come up with plenty of options to purchase some. Like the more traditional foam-core boards (brand name Fome-Cor), [...]
