I have a ritual. The night before any studio booking, I lay everything out on the kitchen table and photograph it with my phone. Lenses, batteries, cards, cables, adapters, the lot. It started as paranoia after I drove forty minutes to a studio in Hackney and realised I had left every single memory card in a card reader plugged into my desktop. That was a £200 booking I could not use. The phone photo means I can check the picture while I am still in the car park, before I carry anything inside.

That is the level of detail this post operates at. If you want a generic "bring your camera and some lights" checklist, there are fifty of those online already. This is the stuff those checklists miss.

The gear list nobody puts on the checklist

Everyone remembers the camera. Most people remember the lenses and the lights. What people forget is the stuff that sits between the gear and the shot.

Gaffer tape. A full roll, not the stub from last time. You will use it for marking floor positions, taping cables down so nobody trips, fixing a backdrop corner that will not stay flat, and probably something nobody could have predicted. I go through a roll every two or three shoots.

A multi-tool or at least a flat-head screwdriver. Light stands have screws that loosen. Clamps seize. Brackets need adjusting. You do not want to be solving a mechanical problem with your fingernails while the client watches.

A power strip with at least four sockets and a 3m cable. Studio wall outlets are never where you need them. The one time I relied on the studio's own extension lead it turned out to be a 1m stub that reached the middle of absolutely nothing.

Spare batteries for things you forgot have batteries. The remote trigger. The light meter. The small LED video light you use for fill. I keep a bag of AAAs and a USB battery pack in my kit permanently now because the cost of replacements is nothing compared to the cost of dead gear mid-shoot.

What to do the morning of (not the night before)

Charge your phone. This sounds stupid but your phone is your tethering backup, your reference image viewer, your timer, your communication line with the client, and your music player if the studio does not have speakers. A dead phone at hour three is more disruptive than a dead flash.

Eat something proper. I mean it. Studio shoots are physical work and they go long. I have watched people get shaky and lose focus by hour four because they skipped breakfast and figured they would grab something after. You will not grab something after. You will keep shooting because you are behind schedule and the light changed. Eat before you leave.

Check the weather if natural light matters. Not the forecast from last night. The one from an hour ago. Cloud cover changes everything in a daylight studio. I once booked a natural light space specifically for hard shadows and arrived to solid overcast. I made it work but the images were nothing like the plan. If I had checked the radar at 7am I could have adjusted my lighting list before I left the house. We wrote about the natural light versus artificial light decision in a separate post if you want the full picture on that.

The studio walk-through that saves the session

When you arrive, do not start unpacking immediately. Walk the space first. Five minutes. Look at the ceiling height. Find the power outlets and count them. Check which lights are already rigged and whether they are the kind you can actually use. Look at the floor for marks, tape residue, or damage you do not want to be blamed for later.

Take a photo of the studio as you found it. This is boring advice that will save you exactly once, which is enough. If there is a scuff on the cyc wall when you arrive, you want proof you did not put it there. Studios are usually reasonable about wear, but "it was already like that" is a much stronger statement when you can show a timestamped image.

Test the wifi. If you are tethering to a laptop or sending files during the shoot, test it before the client arrives. Studio wifi can be terrible, especially in basement or warehouse spaces with thick walls. If it does not work, switch to a hotspot from your phone and move on.

Talking to the studio before you arrive

I send every studio a message the day before with three questions. What is the parking or load-in situation? Is there anything about the space that has changed since the listing photos? And what time can I actually get in (not the booking start, the actual door-open time, which is sometimes fifteen minutes earlier if you ask).

That third question matters more than it looks. If your booking starts at 10am, the client expects shooting at 10am. You need setup time before that. Some studios will let you in early at no charge if the space is free. Others will not. Knowing this in advance means you can either arrive early for free or tell the client "shooting starts at 10:30, I need the first half hour for setup." Neither is a problem. The problem is not knowing and scrambling while the client stands around checking their phone.

If you are still figuring out the basics of booking a studio, that post covers the contract and pricing side. This post is about the shoot day itself.

The thing I still get wrong sometimes

I over-plan. I bring too much gear, build too many setups in my head, and end up rushing through the last third of the session because I spent too long on the first look. The best shoots I have done were the ones where I walked in with a short list, nailed the first setup quickly, and had breathing room for the moments that happen when nobody is performing.

Preparation is not the same as over-preparation. The goal is to remove the stupid problems (dead batteries, missing cables, wrong assumptions about the space) so you can focus on the creative problems, which are the ones worth solving.

FAQs

How early should I arrive before a studio booking?

I aim for thirty minutes before the client is due, which means I ask the studio for door access thirty to forty-five minutes before the official booking start. Most studios in the directory are flexible about early access if they do not have a booking directly before yours. It never hurts to ask.

What if I forget something and the studio does not have a spare?

Happened to me twice. Once with a tethering cable, once with a specific lens adapter. Both times I checked whether there was a camera shop within ten minutes. London tends to have one nearby. Outside a city, you are mostly relying on what you brought. That is why the phone photo of everything on the table exists. I also keep a cheap backup of my most-used cables in the car permanently, not in the kit bag.

Should I bring my own backdrop or use what the studio provides?

If you need white seamless or a basic grey, the studio almost certainly has one. Bring your own only if you need a specific colour, a textured fabric, or something unusual. Muslin wrinkles in transit and you will spend twenty minutes steaming it, so factor that into your setup time. I stopped travelling with backdrops about two years ago and just confirm with the studio beforehand what they have in stock.