Photography, as a hobby and profession, comes with a lot of gear. There are the obvious cameras, lenses, and lights that we all own, but then we start to delve into the oddities of the art form. Throw in a bunch of eccentric professionals, and you can expect to find all sorts of stuff in their studios.
As a Brit, I like to own my slightly strange way of behaving. With that comes a few strange traits, hoarding being one of them. I shoot a few thousand images a week, and I have never deleted a single frame. With this comes chests and chests of hard drives, kind of like how you would have found filing cabinets of negatives back in the day, but far less organized. Although they are all backed up and ingested into my system, I still have all of the original project drives collecting dust. I thought I was alone in this until I posted it to social media and had a load of other pros confess to the same, which got me thinking: what else do we have in our studios that a hobbyist might not be aware of?
In this video, I look at some of the things I use every single day, that if you hadn't been to a professional studio before, you might not expect to find, or at least not find in such abundance, fom certain items being older than the photographer to huge piles of dated electrical goods that we are too stubborn to sell at such a low price compared to what we purchased them for.
Although the list is by no means extensive, it offers a good insight into the mindset of a commercial studio and how we decide where to splash the cash, or more often than not, save it. The tennis ball trick is also something that is useful to pretty much every photographer too!
You didn't mention sandbags!