I recently move my home studio from our sunroom down to the basement.  Oh, the dreaded basement.  I was a little leary to move it down there for two reasons.  One, it’s a freakin’ basement and there isn’t a whole lot of natural light.  the second reason is the low ceilings, barely seven and a half feet, ouch.  I didn’t mind not having the natural light, as I’m mostly using speedlights when I’m shooting indoors.  Plus if I really need natural light I can just go upstairs to the sunroom.  The second issue is a little trickier though.  So far what I’ve done is have my subjects sit a little bit lower than they normally would.  It’s not quite as limiting as I thought it would be, but again, I can head up to the 15 foot ceilings in our sunroom if I really need the height.

On the plus sides I don’t have to clean up and put everything away when I’m done for he day, SWEET.  This is convenient, especially if I want to continue testing out new lighting, or if I’m just exhausted and want to call it a day early.  I also have a ton of shelving in the basement, which I didn’t have in the sunroom.  It’s way easier to grab gear from there than from my huge duffel bags.  I just feel like I have more freedom in the basement, since it was just sitting there unused except for storage…it’s unfinished, but I threw down an old curly rug, a small tv, and BAM, good to go.  I’m going to post soon on the exact setup of the basement and some of the other tweaks I did to convert it.  It’s a great budget choice if you have an unused basement, more to come on this, maybe even my next post….