How to Organize your Studio

What A Mess…

Having just finished up the holiday season is always a relief, at least in how busy we are. After the holidays, we seem to always run into the same issue, a disastrous studio. Christmas props all over the place, backdrops that need to be washed, steamed, and put away, and getting back to the normal day to day setup. Since we know we aren’t the only ones to run into this issue, we decided to share how we keep the studio tamed.

Closet Space

In our studio, we are lucky to have a rather large closet. We refer to this as our “Mary Poppins Closet.” In this closet, we have three large shelves, which we use to separate the stuff we store. Our top-shelf holds the most useless stuff we have, extra tripods, backdrop stands, and backdrops we no longer use. The next shelf down holds our lighting equipment. Softboxes, umbrellas, strobes, speedlights, stands, and any accessories for the modifiers. This is the go to shelf while working in the studio, so we keep it organized for easy access. The lowest shelf starts our prop collection. We start with our newborn props and some holiday props as well. The final spot is the floor, where we store the rest of our holiday and seasonal props. This includes our Christmas, Halloween, Fall and Valentines day props. We try our best to keep them organized to access each at the correct time of year, but you know how that ends up!

Cabinet Space

Next we hit our cabinets. While we use this mostly for office supplies, we do save some shelves for equipment. We mostly store cleaning supplies, extra printer ink, photo paper, pens and pencils and so on, but I like to keep one shelf set for gear. A safe place to store all of my lenses, bodies and anything else I use on a day to day basis in the studio. And of course, we cannot forget the snack section. Can’t have a studio without snacks, that’s just shenanigans.

Furniture Storage

This seems to be a popular option for photographers nowadays because you mix prop with practicality. In our studio, we have a chaise lounge from Wayfair. You can flip it up and store a few things like boom arms, commonly used backdrops, sandbags, and so forth. Anything that lies flat fits perfectly. There are items like storage ottomans that we see around that work great for small items as well!

The Most Important Part

Keep up with the organization! The hardest part in keeping your studio in order is putting it all back where it came from, which can get tough when you start running back to back sessions. This is a constant issue for us as we never have a session identical to the one before it, so it is always a game of grabbing gear and throwing back into the abyss only to grab whatever was behind it in the first place. Keep it organized, keep it easily accessible and you will have no issues keeping your studio clean and not looking like a tornado ripped through it.

We hope this helps anyone out who needs a few ideas to get the organizational ball rolling!

We look forward to hearing from you all, and until then stay happy, healthy and keep on shooting!