Introducing My New Studio Space, and Why I Painted It 18% Gray

by Sean Setters

I just moved into a new house in Savannah and, unfortunately, this one didn't have a large extra bedroom with high ceilings to use as my studio/office space. Fortunately, it did have a detached building that served as the previous owner's workshop.

The floor space available inside the workshop is 17' 5" x 11' 2.5" x 10' 5". The ceiling is 10' 5" at its apex but angles down to create walls which are roughly 7' high. As far as photography studios are concerned, this area is adequate for many needs but few would consider it spacious (especially with the gear that would eventually fill it).

After cleaning out the shop, washing the walls, installing insulation in the ceiling and fixing a minor electrical issue, it was time to decide on what color to paint the walls. Traditionally speaking, white is a good option. But I decided that the traditional option wasn't right for this space.

My previous studio was very slightly larger than this one. And even in that space, controlling light spill could prove problematic. That's because of the numerous nearby bright (yellow) colored walls for the light to bounce off of. Aside from the wall color making color balancing a pain (an x-rite ColorChecker Passport helped), limiting fill light in the space required using black [negative fill] cards for certain shoots.

So while white walls would have helped me avoid color balance issues, it would have compounded my previously-experienced light spill issues in a small (but larger than this) space. After thinking it over, I went to Home Depot and asked the associates in the paint department to mix me "middle gray," or specifically, 18% gray. Apparently, that's not a color that's found in their system. The next day I took a gray card to Home Depot and asked for a color match.

The above photo was taken just after the studio was painted. There's substantially less useable space now that my studio gear is all in place.

For this relatively small space, the benefits of having 18% gray walls include:

• Less light is reflected compared to white walls, helping to limit light spill for better overall control.
• For the light that does bounce off the walls, color influence is negligible.
• A gray background is great for classic portraiture.
• When gelling the background with flash, gray tends to work better because gelled flashes firing at white walls tend to get washed out relatively easily if any of your ungelled main light contaminates the background.

Unfortunately, there's only one small section of the room where the wall is actually bare and useable for background purposes, and that particular section is located on one of the longer sides of the room (shown above, left side between two power outlets), leaving a relatively small working space that is more appropriate for headshots or head-and-shoulder portraits as opposed to full length portraits. I can of course shoot longways in the studio with many other background options available. Below is recent head-and-shoulders shot I made in the new studio that was used by the subject's parents for a modeling call.