A small photo studio setup with nothing fixed

A small photo studio setup usually starts with a list of equipment. Rhomn Studio started with a problem about use. A fitness session needs clear floor and height, a product shoot needs controllable light and a clean corner, and a portrait needs somewhere that does not read as a gym. Those three uses argue with each other, and most spaces resolve it by picking one.

The answer here was to build almost nothing permanent. The floor is poured concrete, the walls are white, and a black steel grid runs across the ceiling so light can hang from wherever a particular shoot needs it rather than wherever someone once decided it should go. There is no fixed set. A full-height glazed wall supplies daylight, and an open steel stair leads to a mezzanine that works as a second level.

The grid is the decision everything else depends on. Fixed lighting positions quietly fix the kind of photograph a room can make, because the light always arrives from the same place. A grid moves that decision from construction day to shoot day, which is where it belongs in a room that has to serve a photographer in the morning and a fitness coach filming programme content in the afternoon.

Rhomn & Co provided the full architectural and design services, from the steel stair and the mezzanine through to the furniture and the single round port window, and then moved in and started using it for its own shoots. Building somewhere you then work in every day is a short feedback loop. Several of the things that look deliberate now are the second version of something that did not hold up in use.

The studio is in Bečići and is open to photographers, fitness coaches and content creators. The space and what it carries are on the studio page, and its own work goes up on Instagram at @rhomnstudio.