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I have been considering opening a studio for some time know and have found difficulty finding a retail unit that has the dimensions required for photography with a white background. I just wanted to know if it would be possible to make a high street studio work without doing high key photography. I know that it is quite a popular style of photography but it is beginging to look a bit played out and i know think it may be possible to specialise in portrait photography with just grey and black backgrounds. Does anyone thik this is possible. If so it would mean i could get a smaller property that costs less.
Thanks
Lucian
Would you open a bakers shop but not sell cakes?
many studios use just a mid grey background which can be overlit compared to your main subject to produce a white background or underlit to produce a dark background; you can even have an alternative chroma key background on a paper roll which colour can easily be selected within P/S in favour of an alternative background colour. Your grey backdrop can be lit with colour gels and masks can be placed over your flash to produce shapes.; there's more to portraiture than high key and cakes; g'luck 
people like the white back ground and if they are paying then that's what I do.
Black is not such a popular back drop with general public at this time, high key is in.
Grey is not a back drop I would use, it looks drab and boring in my opinion where as white can really pull out those wonderful colours on clothes clients wear.
If you want to make money I would do what the public want, after all they are paying.
I have a few backdrops, black, white and mottled colours, and I tend to give the customer the choice.
I have done quite a lot of portraites in my studio for customers this year and all have been white back grounds which were the choice of the customer.
I can assure you that your choice of background is irrelevant.
Portraiture in particular is dead above the £10 spend level and the high street is finished.
You would be MAD to open such a business nowadays, in my opinion..
Re the £10 comment...
We have a local Max Spielman store in a shopping mall. They take pics on a bridge camera under continuous lights, with a kid on a chair 1foot in front of a hilite background with the camera 1foot from the kids face. They show the mother the resulting disaster, pull out the card, stick it in their printer and put the outputted print in a folder and charge them £10. The queue is sometimes 20 long and they all go away smiling, despite the distorted result that most of us wouldn't entertain...
So thats high street photography in the 21st century Lucian. and thats why I think you're mad even considering opening a business.
I seen a max speilman shop the other day and they only had a black background. I looked at their sample canvases and they were ov very poor quality. It did not even look like canvas it looked like plastic sheet that had been stretched round a frame and did not have the weaved texture of the canvases that i do.
There is a photography studio in my town and they dont do weddings so that would indicate to me that they are making enough of portraits to make a decent living. I want a studio that can make a small profit on portraits after the rent has been paid and to make my wedding photography side of the business better.
Lucian
i have just bought a van with a 27metre ariel on top of it for a ground based ariel photography buisness i am setting up in my area i had this problem a few months ago when i was researching the buisness,at the end of the day you will have to speculate to acumulate if i did not have the equipment i could not show prespective clients what i can do with it !!! you get one life live it.if you dont try you will never no
Lucian hasn't told us where he intends to place his studio. Without this vital information, no advice is likely to help him.
An experienced professional can make money from just about any studio, but the business does have to be configured to suit the location.
The problem is that the general public in general will pay £10 for a poor photo but not pay £25 for a good photo....... the number of people that know that will go to a exotic place for a holiday like Bali Or sri lanka and pay 2-4k for the holiday but when I enquire if they are taking a camera with them they reply..... " a camera phone " I suggest they buy a camera to capture there holiday they then say how much...... I reply about £250 for a decent compact camera and they look at me in horror ......they will not pay less than 10% of there holiday budget to capture images they may never get the chance to capture again....... instead will come back with camera phone images and shaky grainy video footage.......peoples concept of quality has gone out of the window
Your wedding and portraits business are mututally exclusive. Your ability to shoot portraits against a white background says nothing about your wedding abilities.
Seriously, your portraits will not get you weddings work and you could struggle to pay the rent on just portraits alone.
I also don't agree with thewilliam, regardless of your experience people are not spending money so the idea that you just change the business model to suit just doesn't work. Trading is horrendous at the moment...
Know what you mean there about peoples concept of quality. My brother was showing me photo's of his daughter on Christmas day that his camera phone had captured in HDR! (best thing to use apparently as then you don't need to use flash)! God, they were absolutely Sh*te, you couldn't tell who was in the picture (blur and more grain than you could possibly imagine), but the way he was explaining it, there is no point in my having a decent camera when he can take such brilliant HDR shots with his phone 
I really didn't have the heart to explain that HDR for a moving child is probably not the best way to capture the image.
Hubby was dying with laughter in the corner of the room.
Scotishphototours=you are a honest man.
You might be unliked by many because it's not what budding photographers want to hear,but in actual fact you could be saving them money,or should we not give advice and let them find out the hard way with all the knocks in life.
The new word in photography is produce sh-t,it's the in-thing,oh! and it's cheap to produce.
The day's are over for quality,the cinema has gone the same way.
A couple of tweeks on the computer and that will fix it.
By the way,if you want to open up a shop make it next door to a Supermarket-but don't sell the same goods as they do.
Making money in a photographic studio in a High Street is the stuff of dreams.Unlike yesteryears.
A big Studio business has closed down in my town Brentwood ( near the famous Sugar Hut night Club) -- nobody getting married much. they all live with 'Partners' and do not want 'Wedding Photos' then when the babies come they take their own on a phone or a Compact Digital and take the card to Boots and that is good enough !
Quote: The problem is that the general public in general will pay £10 for a poor photo but not pay £25 for a good photo....... the number of people that know that will go to a exotic place for a holiday like Bali Or sri lanka and pay 2-4k for the holiday but when I enquire if they are taking a camera with them they reply..... " a camera phone " I suggest they buy a camera to capture there holiday they then say how much...... I reply about £250 for a decent compact camera and they look at me in horror ......they will not pay less than 10% of there holiday budget to capture images they may never get the chance to capture again....... instead will come back with camera phone images and shaky grainy video footage.......peoples concept of quality has gone out of the window
Did you ever think that maybe they don't put photographs as high up their priority list as you and are more likely to enjoy their images on a computer screen than as enlargements? Doesn't make them idiots, it just means they value different things to you.
BTW they don't need to spend £250 to get decent holiday snaps. In the past, before mass digital, the average family had no camera at all or a 126, APS, Disk or other low res, low quality camera. The camera phone that you laugh at probably produces images of equal or better quality than the typical family camera of the 1960s>1990s.
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