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This isn't car photography

Parts catalogue work is its own discipline. It's not car photography. I can't stress this enough.

Full-car work is about environment, drama, angle. You're selling a lifestyle. Parts photography is different — you're selling a component to a buyer who needs to know exactly what it looks like, from every angle, with consistent colour and perfect clarity. The audience is a parts manager at a garage or someone on an e-commerce site comparing caliper options at 11pm.

Those are different problems. They need different studios.

I've shot wheels, brake assemblies, exhaust manifolds, seats, dashboards, and more timing belts than I care to remember. And I can tell you: I've booked studios that were perfect for editorial car work and absolutely useless for a 200-SKU parts shoot. So here's what I actually look for.

The core problem — light on metal

Polished alloy is brutal. That's just the reality of it. A bare wheel, a polished caliper, a chrome exhaust tip — these surfaces act like mirrors. They reflect everything in the studio back at the camera. Every softbox rib. Every ceiling tile. Every shadow from a stand you forgot to move.

Most studios aren't built with this in mind. They're built for fashion, food, general commercial work. Those disciplines don't require you to sculpt light across a curved reflective surface that changes geometry every 15 degrees of turntable rotation.

So the first question I ask any studio: what's the ceiling height and are there any windows? Because you don't want either if you're shooting polished components.

Blackout capability

This is non-negotiable for rim and component work. Full blackout.

Natural light through a roof window creates uncontrollable hotspots on polished alloy. You can spend an hour trying to fight it with negative fill and black poly bounce and you'll still get a hotspot that moves as the sun moves. Kill it at source. Book a blacked-out room.

A lot of studios offer "blackout" that's actually "we can draw the blinds." That's not the same thing. I've been caught out. Ask specifically: do the blackout blinds completely seal the windows, and are there any rooflights or roof panels that let in ambient light? Get a definitive answer before you book.

Turntable size — and why 60cm isn't always enough

Turntables are central to catalogue parts work. The client wants 24-position rotation shots, sometimes 36, sometimes 72. That requires a consistent, reliable motorised turntable — and it needs to be the right size for what you're shooting.

For small components — brake pads, sensors, filter housings, small trim pieces — a 60cm turntable is perfectly usable. Fast to set up, easy to position, and the camera-to-subject distance stays manageable.

But wheels are a different matter entirely. A 20-inch alloy with tyre fitted is a substantial object. You need a minimum 120cm turntable, ideally with a weight rating above 50kg, because some full-size alloys with fitting kit are heavier than you'd expect. I've tried putting a large wheel on an 80cm turntable — the tyre overhang caused reflections of the turntable edge in every single shot. Wasn't usable. Shot the lot again.

Some studios own their turntables. Others let you bring in your own. Either way, confirm the floor surface where the turntable will sit. It needs to be dead level. Even a one-degree slope causes a visible wobble on a 72-frame rotation shot that ruins the spin animation for the client's product page.

Floor spec

Speaking of floors — this matters more than most photographers realise until they've had a problem with it.

The floor in the shooting area needs to be level, hard, and consistent in surface colour. For large parts like wheels or seats, you're often shooting them on-floor with the turntable at ground level. If the floor is slightly bowed or uneven, the turntable wobbles. If the floor surface changes colour partway through a shot — say, the studio has uneven painted concrete that's been touched up in patches — that shows in the reflections on polished metal.

Black paper roll or grey painted floors work best for most component work. White cyc is not your friend here. It creates a strong upward light bounce that blows out detail on the underside of components. I've had to kill the floor exposure with black card laid around the turntable more times than I can count in studios with glossy white cyc floors.

If you're booking a studio primarily designed for white cyc work, flag this upfront. Ask whether you can lay down black poly or dark card on the floor around the setup area.

Power supply

Turntables are often overlooked here. Even a mid-range motorised turntable can draw 3–5 amps continuously, and larger professional units more. Add your strobe packs, tethered laptop, and a fan if you're cooling something down, and you can hit a 13-amp socket limit fast.

The studios I rate for catalogue work have dedicated 16-amp or 32-amp outlets in the shooting areas — not shared ring mains with the corridor and the kitchen. Dedicated circuits. I ask about this specifically when booking for longer parts shoots because I've had a breaker trip mid-sequence before and lost an hour to resetting and restarting the entire rotation capture.

Tethering and catalogue workflow

Parts catalogue work is almost always tethered. You're shooting into Capture One or Lightroom, applying a session preset on-capture, and either naming files by SKU or using a custom naming convention the client specifies. Speed matters. A 200-part catalogue at six angles per part plus the rotation sequence is a long day, and you can't afford the tether dropping.

What I look for: fast ethernet or reliable studio WiFi that can handle continuous Capture One tethering without dropping. A dedicated power point for the tethering station at a height that doesn't require the cable to run across the floor. And table space — a proper work table, not a fold-out thing that wobbles every time you click the shutter.

Some studios have this sorted. Others, you're rigging your own workstation from a C-stand arm and hoping no-one trips over the ethernet cable.

Backgrounds — not just white

Here's the thing: automotive parts catalogue photography is predominantly dark. Black or very dark grey backgrounds dominate. Look at any OEM parts catalogue from a premium brand — Bosch, Brembo, AP Racing — and you'll see most components shot on black or mid-grey.

Why? Because it gives you control over the edge light. A polished alloy on a black background lets you pop the edges with rim light and create a floating, premium look. On white, you're fighting the background exposure the whole time, and the edges of a silver component simply disappear into it.

So a studio with a great white cyc is only half the picture — pun intended. I need to know: can I easily swap to a full black background? Is there a roll of black Colorama? Is there somewhere to hang a large black backdrop frame or rig black polyboard?

The best-spec studios for this work have multiple background options ready to go. The worst ones have one wall of white painted brick and a single roll of white background paper.

Lighting kit — what I bring

I'm not relying on house lights for this kind of work. I bring my own kit.

For fill and general exposure, I use the Godox AD600Pro — 600Ws, battery-powered or mains, compatible with a full modifier range. For a standard wheel or component setup, I'll have two or three of these running: one large diffusion frame overhead (120x180cm at minimum), one rim light unit behind the turntable, and a fill card or a third unit at very low power for shadow detail.

C-stands are essential. I need to position diffusion frames precisely over the subject and they need to stay put while the turntable rotates. If a studio has decent C-stand stock, that's a genuine selling point. If I have to bring six of my own C-stands on top of the strobe kit, that's a £70–80 transport cost built into the day rate.

Scrims and diffusion frames — again, I'll often bring my own, but a studio that has large diffusion frames rigged to a ceiling grid is worth a premium over one with nothing rigged.

Where to find this kind of studio in the UK

For London-based catalogue work, I've found decent options in a few specific areas.

Park Royal — the industrial area in West London — has several units converted to tabletop and product studios with the kind of power supply and dark room capability that works for component photography. It's automotive-adjacent as an area, which means some studios there actually understand what this type of work demands.

Bermondsey and South Bermondsey have a cluster of studios that work well for small-to-medium parts work — good floor space, blackout capability, reasonable power infrastructure. Tottenham and Haringey have some larger industrial-unit studios better suited to bigger assemblies and seats. Less fashion-focused, more production-oriented.

Outside London: Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter has some interesting tabletop studio space, and Manchester has a growing number of production-oriented studios around the Northern Quarter and Salford that I've heard good things about from photographers up there.

What it actually costs

Real numbers: a tabletop-equipped studio with a motorised turntable, blackout, and proper power in London runs £150–200 per hour for a capable, well-specced room. You're not in there for an hour — a serious parts catalogue day is 8–10 hours minimum.

For larger parts rooms without the tabletop setup, where you're bringing your own turntable and rigging, you're looking at £85–130 per hour. These are often more flexible spaces with room to move and higher ceilings, but you're doing more of the prep work yourself.

Half-day and full-day rates are always better value. Most studios discount significantly for full-day bookings, and for catalogue work, that's almost always how you should be booking — you need the contingency time.

A shoot that taught me something

I did a brake component catalogue job a couple of years back — 150-odd SKUs, mostly calipers and brake discs, with a few suspension arms thrown in. I'd booked a studio based on the photos on their website. Clean, bright, professional-looking product shots.

What I didn't ask about: floor levelness. The studio had a slightly bowed wooden sprung floor in the shooting area. Probably great for dance photography. Exactly wrong for a turntable. We spent the first hour shimming the turntable base with folded card until we got a rotation that didn't visibly wobble in the final spin sequence.

The second problem: the ceiling. Beautiful big rooflights, ideal for fashion natural light setups. Death for polished caliper photography. The available blackout was two roller blinds that didn't meet in the middle. We lost two hours to reflections we couldn't kill before I gave up and built a full black poly tent around the setup — which we should have done at the start, but we'd been trying to use the studio as designed rather than working around it.

The shoot got done. The client was happy in the end. But we lost three hours to problems I should have screened for in the brief. Now I have a list of questions I send to every studio before I book for parts work, and it's saved me that kind of grief twice since.

Finding the right studio

The honest truth is that very few studios specifically market themselves for automotive parts catalogue work. You're usually booking a "product studio" or a "tabletop studio" and then having a conversation to figure out whether it actually suits the specific challenges of polished metal components and turntable rotation work.

That's where a directory with proper filtering actually helps — being able to search by floor type, blackout availability, power supply, and existing equipment rather than scrolling through studio website after studio website trying to work out if the floor is level enough.

creativestudiohire.com lets you filter UK studios by the specs that matter for this kind of work. It's how I research new locations before committing to a booking for a catalogue job — much faster than the old way of ringing round and hoping the person who answers actually knows what a 32-amp supply means.

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