Kim St. Dennis Photography

Los Angeles is a used tissue for aspiring professional photograhers. I paint that picture only becuase in order to shoot at a lot of our lovely locations around the county, you need to caugh up some dough. This is a side effect of LA being the home of the US film industry for the past 100 years or so. Essentially, unless you "run and gun," every Tom, Dick, and Harry has their hand out to get paid if a tripod or lightstand hit the ground. What can one do?

Well, one can take a class at a local college and use the studio, parking garage, and out door locations there! This maximizes the econmics of paying for shooting space and also gets me out of the house every thursday night (as if someone had to pull my arm to get me out).

So, my buddy James Stiles (www.jamesstilesphoto.com) grabs about 8-10 of us a handful of models each week, we set up some lighting to our desired look, we get the use of a free MUA, and get to shoot away. The studio is about 2.5k sqft. equiped with 6-8 Norman packs and 16 or so heads, super big softboxes, gels, grids, etc. Considering the cheaperst studio Ive found to rent is $25.00 per hour, the cost of the class is not bad at all.