Finishing up the studio

With so many things to do when starting a business, I have ignored building the studio space itself for the longest of time. Now, finally I have set up the studio backdrop holder on the wall and the studio is officially operational.

The studio space is in the basement of an 100 years old building in Töölö. Needless to say, this isn’t an ideal location to set up a photographic studio with the difficult access, low ceiling and myriad of piping sticking out from every corner of the room. It took some planning to set everything in place in the studio place, just like in the darkroom.

Some of the problems of this space, the old sauna compartment of the building, are the uneven floor, the fact that the floor is in two levels, the low ceiling and the shoddily done renovation work of the whole basement area. I heard from management that the whole floor was recast in concrete. But somehow the company in charge of it managed to make it uneven in every possible direction so, that even setting up some cabinets against the wall is impossible without a lot of effort and extra bits of wood to even out the floor.

This building was built in 1923 when Töölö was a new and rapidly growing neighbourhood at the edge of Helsinki. Construction was mostly done by hand. Women carried bricks on their backs and men laid them in place one by one. It must’ve been a backbreaking labour for everyone involved. Now, a hundred years later it is easier to judge the construction quality with some detachment from the effort by the builders. I don’t know how well the upper floors with apartment are built, and I can’t be sure these basement walls are original, but I must say the quality is uneven at best. Some parts of the wall are extremely hard and really difficult to drill through while other parts are like paper, and I hardly needed to use the drill to make a hole. Simply pushing the drill head was enough to puncture the old bricks in these parts. This means, of course, that some of the bricks are so soft that they cannot hold up any screws in even with the expensive high-tech plugs that I tried using. Luckily, the electrician who did all the electric work in these rooms before I started with my own building showed me a few tricks of his involving spiced bits of wood as plugs. According to him, these issues are common in old houses like this, and back in the day pieces of wood were used as plugs when attaching something to the walls because this technique simply works.

The fact that I don’t have a car and have to rely on my Bakfiets for most transportation needs does limit my working speed as well. For larger amounts of items I have rented a van, but mostly I move around on the bike. For some bigger items like the freezer and fridge that I got second hand, I built a flatbed platform for the bike from some leftover sauna seating planks I got for free. I used the same planks to build the backdrop holder! Minimizing waste materials and costs.

In the end, the backdrop holder stays in place, the paper rolls don’t get caught in the piping and everything is looking reasonably professional. The same cannot be said of the “office side” of the room, but that is still a temporary solution. I will move office to the darkroom side once I manage to install the last working desk there.

The studio room also works as the clothing rental and sales storage, vintage camera and design display and storage and maintenance space, so every corner will be eventually filled up with all kinds of stuff. I’m still figuring out where everything will go and how to display the items nicely when customers walk in, so that it wouldn’t give off a claustrophobic feeling. So far so good.

Finishing up, but still a lot to do! The important thing is, that now I can finally get down to work and get some actual studio portraits done here. Need to work on a better self-portrait when I have the time.