Notes from the studio

Things worth knowing before you book a block on West 1st Avenue. Written by the people who open the door.

Light through the year

In late June the two north windows push usable light until about 19:40, which means a 17:00 start still gives you two clean hours without a strobe. By the second week of December that same light fades near 15:10, and most bookings after 14:00 run on the ceiling heads from the first frame.

Cloud cover in Vancouver is fairly even from October to March, so the window light stays soft rather than flickering. That suits product work. It suits portraiture less if you want a hard edge, so bring a bare reflector or use the parabolic.

Noise and the building

Unit C-19 sits above a bike workshop and next to a ceramics studio. Weekday mornings are quiet. Between 13:00 and 15:30 the workshop runs a compressor that hums through the floor; you will hear it on a lav mic but not on a condenser pointed at a person two metres away.

The building bans hammering, drilling and anything with a generator. If your shoot needs a fogger, ask first — the fire panel in the corridor is sensitive and the building manager has to be told in advance.

The neighbourhood

Coffee within three minutes: two cafés on West 2nd near Ash, and a bakery on Columbia that opens at 07:00. Lunch options cluster around Olympic Village, a five-minute walk west.

For props and materials, the hardware store on Main Street near 2nd carries seamless paper, gaffer tape and foam core. The art supply shop further up Main stocks coloured gels and diffusion.

If you need a courier to pick up a garment from a showroom downtown, most services reach the lane door in about 25 minutes on a weekday.

What we repaint and when

The cyclorama cove gets a fresh coat roughly every six weeks, and always in the first week of January, May and September. If you are shooting white-on-white and need a flawless floor, ask when the last paint day was — we will tell you honestly rather than book you into a scuffed week.

The grey and black sides are repainted on the same schedule. Paper rolls are replaced as they tear, and the white roll is the one that goes first.