Building the ultimate gear room for photographers and filmmakers

Camera gear, whether it’s for photography or filmmaking can be quite the pain to store, especially if it’s your career and you’re constantly adding new gear to your kit. And I’m not talking about buying more gear for the sake of buying more gear, I mean you actually need all this stuff to offer more services and a better quality of service to your clients. It’s just the nature of the beast when you work in a creative industry that requires a camera.

The folks at Syrp Lab faced this issue, with gear strewn around all over the place (a common problem for many of us) and the boss instructed his team to tidy up the gear room and make it more efficient. While this setup might be a little overkill for some of us, it offers some great tips and advice on how we might be able to better store some of our own kit.

Syrp’s makeover is definitely a bit on the extreme side, but it’s not uncommon to see this level of organisation in a working studio. Everything has its place and it needs to live in that place in order to ensure that it’s all easy to get to whenever you need it and to make sure that none of it’s gone missing. Syrp’s journey begins with ordering $11K’s worth of shelves and drawers (I told you it was on the extreme side), but I expect most of us will be primarily working with the furniture we already have.

What’s interesting is not so much how much storage they added to the room but how they made use of it to get the most out of it. Things like the drawer divider system they designed and made from simple fabric-wrapped MDF and some 3D printed connectors to keep everything aligned and arranged, for example. 3D printers have become such wonderful tools and allow us all kinds of options for creating custom storage solutions. I use a lot of 3D printed divider systems here at home that I designed for use inside store-bought drawers to keep electronics components and camera bits neat and organised, too.

The charging wall is also a great idea, allowing for a lot more configurability than your typical charging station. Most charging stations are essentially a bunch of chargers taped, glued or velcroed to some kind of hard wooden back with little room for reconfiguration as old chargers are retired and new ones are added. Syrp’s system makes use of a metal backing board and then neodymium magnets are glued to the chargers allowing them to easily swap them out as required. It also makes it easy for them to pull one off the wall and take it on the road if they need to travel with it, too.

Tripod storage also becomes a pain once you get more than a couple of them. I currently have nine (I think, I’m probably forgetting one or two) of various sizes, load capacities, uses (photo vs video) and storing them all out of the way is often a literal balancing act to have them all take up as little room as possible. Syrp’s wine rack idea is pretty interesting although, for me, I think I’ll go for wall storage the next time I redesign my own gear organisation.

One of the other big benefits of the redesign they’ve done here is that it also allows the gear storage room to act as a studio for filming in. With everything spread around the outside of the room along the walls, it leaves the middle of the room completely open for a subject to sit or stand to show something off at a table. Plus, are you really a photo/video gear YouTuber if you don’t show off all your gear in the background behind you?

There are a bunch of other little tips darted about the video on how different gear can be stored and how storage systems like drawers and shelves can be modified and adapted to better suit the gear that’s being housed in or on them, so be sure to pay attention.

How well organised is your gear?