Long time readers will note that I have been using a room in the house as my photo studio, alas I feel I have outgrown my humble beginnings, but what to do? My wife won’t let me kick any of the kids out of their bedrooms and she won’t let me take over the larger living room. This left two options, 1) Rent a space somewhere, 2) Build a new studio in the garage. Given budgetary contraints, I opted for number 2, and the Project L7 Studio has begun. Today we look at the plan do build my ultimate home studio. Read on for more details.

Step 1 – The Garage
The garage was a total disaster, it used to be a big workshop for me to work on Radio Control vehicles and actually had a small area for taking product photos of the products I was reviewing and writing about (my first real experience doing a lot of photography). Once I sold off that website, the garage began turning into a total junkyard of…well…junk. We had built a large worktable which became even more space for even more junk. In order to even begin this project the garage needed to be cleaned out, and this has been my project for the past six weeks so far. Every week I have filled all of our available trash cans with trash and have sold everything worth selling on craigslist.

Six weeks, 10 trashcans full of stuff, tons of craiglist sales, and a lot of organization later, and the space that will become the new home studio is really coming together. When finished, the main shooting area will be 17′ x 15′. I still have enough trash to fill two weeks of trashcans, the wife has huge piles of plastic organizes to…organize, and we have boxes and bags of stuff to donate to Goodwill and we need to buy one or two storage racks to finish the areas off. This will complete the cleaning process and allow the build stage to begin.

While you may never build a home studio as complete as our studio is going to be, the ideas that we present will help you build your own home studio to fit your own needs, budgets, and desires.

Step 2 – The Plan
With the garage coming together and seeing how much space we have available, its time to start doing some planning on exactly what we are going to do out there. The garage has a built-in workbench on the right side that I am going to leave for storage and shelf space. The right side will get hangers to hold 10′ pieces of seamless paper, and a white muslin sheets will seperate the shooting area from the rest of the garage area.

Now you know what I have been up to for the past few weeks, one one hand its taking a long time to build this studio project out and on the other hand it’s actually going better than I expected. In upcoming articles we will look at how to overcome issues such as the wooden rafters, using inexpensive lighting techniques, how to mount lights, and a number of other issues we are seeing that are going to be issues that we need to deal with. Hopefully this will inspire you to take your home studio to the next level as well.

If you have a home studio, please go to our Flickr Group and share some thoughts and pictures of your home atudio with everyone.

If you are into Do-It-yourswelf projects, be sure and visit our friends over at DIYPhotography.net.

Read Building a Home Studio Part 2

Author: Kerry Garrison

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