Why Your Studio Workflow Is Costing You an Hour Per Shoot (And How to Fix It)

Why Your Studio Workflow Is Costing You an Hour Per Shoot (And How to Fix It)

The Shoot That Made Me Rethink Everything I once showed up to a corporate headshot day with twelve subjects booked in four hours and no written lighting plan. I had the setup in my head. I’d shot similar work a hundred times. What I hadn’t accounted for was the studio assistant I’d never worked with before, a modeling session that ran over and compressed my setup window, and the fact that I’d swapped my key light modifier the night before and hadn’t re-metered the ratios.

Why Your Studio Workflow Is Slower Than It Needs to Be (And What My Tape Labels Have to Do With It)

Why Your Studio Workflow Is Slower Than It Needs to Be (And What My Tape Labels Have to Do With It)

The Twenty Minutes That Cost Me a Client A few years back, I was mid-shoot on a beauty campaign, three hours into a six-hour day rate, and my first assistant called out that the kicker on the hair light had drifted two stops. Not because anyone touched it. Because I hadn’t written down the output setting when I built the setup that morning, and we’d been swapping modifiers between setups. By the time we rebuilt the look, we’d burned twenty-two minutes and the client was visibly irritated.