The Works Studio: New Years Resolutions

Sunday, 26 December 2010

New Years Resolutions

Probably a little early for new year's resolutions, but I think I'll be to busy after new year to write them down. so here they are to take effect from 1st Jan 2011. okay I'll start with the ones I know I'll probably break before 2nd Jan.

Start the sensible diet, not drink as much, not get arsy with Penny as much, and generally be a nice person; and the ones I do intend to keep at least til next year, stop lending stuff to people, stop giving stuff away, be a lot more targeted in how I run the studio, I also want to practice my make up a lot more, I'm already a qualified MUA but need to do a bit more practice, I also think I'm going to learn a bit about hair styling, whilst I don't think i'll ever be a full-on hair dresser I want to be able to do a bit of styling for the models so I can offer make-up and hair styling in the studio. We will still be getting in professional MUA and stylists for our commercial work, but will now be able to offer this to our amateur photographers. The studio has a professional Iwata/Temptu airbrush make-up system which will produce some fantastic results, so a lot of my time is going to be devoted to becoming really good at that: watch this blog to see how I'm are getting on! We are also going to try and break the mould a bit as a hire studio and offer fashion photography alongside our glamour and art nude days. many of our photographers have said they don't want to shoot glamour as it's simple not what they want to do. What they have asked is if we can find some fashion model and run days with them, so that's exactly what we are going to do. we will still be having our glamour and art model, so don't worry.

Towards the end of last year we were in talks with Kerri Parker about running her academy days for Cambridgeshire at our studio, and are delighted that we will be running our first KPA day on the 30th Jan 2011, and hope to have Kerri along (weather permitting) .

We had the last meeting of the St Ives Fashion and Beauty photography club early in December when we decided to change the name (the old one was a bit of a mouthful) to Face Works, the club was set up as a photographic club but with a much more specific aim than most clubs, Face Works is devoted to "people photography" and is not just open to photographers we also welcome models, make-up artists and stylists along to our meetings, which are normally held at the studio on the first Wednesday of the month, we have a small charge of £4 per meeting. which we hope everyone feels is great value for money as most other clubs with the same charge are held in village halls and scout huts, and not large professional photographic studios. Finally for this blog entry I hope everyone had a great Christmas and I would like to wish you all a prosperous New Year

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The Works Studio, St Ives, Cambridgeshire

The Works studio is a fully self contained photographic facility with much more to offer than just a large white studio box, we have meeting rooms, a very large room with a bar for teaching and meetings, that can also double up as two more studio areas. The studio is available for hire to professional and amateur users alike, whether you are a model, photographer, designer or make-up artist The Works is the perfect place to work. Hire charges start at £25 per/hour, with discounts for students and longer bookings over four hours.
The Studio area measures 30foot x 36foot with a ceiling height of nearly 20 foot, (This is no converted spare room or garden shed!) with a 16foot wide x 10foot high infinity cove with 10 foot deep floor providing nearly three times more space than the average colorama backdrop studio.

Our studio is quite different from many “glamour studios” that have been painted plain white. All white studios are great for some types of photography such as hi-key glamour and fashion, but it is virtually impossible to shoot lo-key art photography in one. Whilst hi-key lighting can easily be achieved in our studio with the use of lighting and polystyrene sheets. The same cannot be said for creating lo-key, lighting with hard shadows in all white studio. Quite simply, the light gets reflected off all the walls and kills any shadows.

At the Works studio we have carefully created the perfect balance of white infinity cove for fashion, surrounded with dark walls to allow shadows to be created and controlled. The studio is a converted 1930’s factory and we have left much of the old factory ‘feel’ in the building, we have not replaced the rather distressed old wood flooring with shiny laminate, and the walls have been kept in their original industrial condition, when you first come in to our studio you may feel the building a slightly dilapidated compared to the shiny new studios build in modern factory units, but as soon as you start to be creative the building comes to life, we do not have room sets, if you want to shoot in a bedroom set why not just use a real bedroom! If you are a ‘guy with a camera’ our studio really is not for you, however! if you are a creative photographer looking for total control of your lighting, then we feel we are the best studio around, we don’t just have big soft boxes, we also have specialist lighting such as 70cm beauty dishes with honey combs, and Quadmatic spotlights that can be fitted with gobos to create silhouettes and shadows, we have one of the latest Bowens ring flash pro. Or if you prefer we have a set of five 800w Photo Beard Redhead tungsten lights, and a RRB 1Kw broad light, ideal for recreating the 1950’s feel, from before the days of studio flash. If we were to liken our studio to anything we would say it’s more like something from the film ‘Blow Up’ than the rather phoney TV show ‘America’s next top model'
We understand many of our customers want to shoot on plain colour backgrounds, so if it's a colorama background you require we also have them, our system is fitted to our balcony allowing rolls to be changes safely and easily at waist height, (no going up ladders in this studio) at 8feet high the balcony overlooks the infinity cove so can be used to shoot down on to the cove area. Underneath the balcony is a fully equipped model's changing room with four make-up stations and the latest Iwata airbrush makeup system. The studio can be accessed either from the main entrance or directly through double doors from our large car park making it easy to unload heavy equipment or props directly in to the studio. Whilst the studio is not fully compliant with the latest disability access requirements, we have gone a long way to making all our facilities wheel chair friendly and we welcome disabled photographers.