What's on Our Shooting Cart

Happy October!! How crazy that it's October already? 

I just want to say thank you all for being here in this little community of ours. It's so fun to see you all chatting in Slack and we appreciate all of you so much! If you have any topics you want us to cover make sure to let us know - we're always looking for inspiration for new posts and want to focus on what is most helpful for you. 

Today I'm going to share with you the things we always keep on our shooting cart. These are not all of the tools that we use when shooting, but they are the things we use most often so we like to keep them close by. Just as an FYI this post does contain affiliate links, but we only share items that we actually use and find to be helpful in our workflow. 

Back in the day before we had our own studio, we used to keep all of these things in a bag that was actually a baby bag haha. We liked it because it had so many compartments for organizing. We used to tote it around when we would rent studios or pull it out of my garage when we shot in my living room. I definitely recommend this if you're moving around a lot, it's helpful to have everything in one place and it helps you to not forget anything. 

Here's a quick photo I snapped of our cart the other day, I realized that all of the images we have of it are far away haha. 

We get a lot of questions about what we use as our cart, and unfortunately the exact one that we have is no longer available. It's actually an outdoor bar car haha, we got it because we liked the amount of space it has, the fact that it rolls and folds up if needed, and that it's not ugly haha. This is the only similar one I can find. It's not black but you could always spray paint it if you don't like the grey. 

The little baskets and trays we use to organize things are from Target - here and here. 

As you can kind of see in the left back of the cart, we have an extension cord with 6 outlets attached with a bungie cord. This allows us to plug in multiple things into the cart without having a bunch of cords all over the place. 

Here are a few closer images of everything: 

Ok, let's run through all of the tools that we keep on the cart.  

Monitor - This is the one we use, and it usually lives on Arabela's desk. She moves it to the cart when we're shooting. You could also definitely use your laptop, but we love being able to see details large on the monitor. You can read more about our decision to invest in a monitor here. 

Extra batteries - We blow through batteries like crazy during a shoot so we always keep several fully charged backups on the cart. 

Grey card - We always take an image with a grey card every time we change the colors in a shoot. You can read more about how we use grey cards for color correcting here. 

Clamps - We keep several different sizes and use them to hold up the set, arrange fabric, and so much more. I definitely recommend having a variety on set and personally always choose metal over plastic. 

Light meter - Ok I'm actually not sure why this is on our cart as we never use it haha. Just wanted to mention it since it's in the images and someone may be curious. 

Air blaster  - This is helpful to clean off any dust that gets on the lens while shooting. 

Microfiber cloth - We use this constantly to clean products before placing them in the set. 

Profoto air remote - To connect our lights to our camera remotely, we keep this on the cart so it doesn't get lost haha. 

Fishing line - For suspending objects. You can read more about it as well as how we use putty and helping hands here. 

Wire - We don't use this as much as fishing line, but it can be helpful for when you need something more stiff. 

Poster putty - The holy grail for making things stay in place. We can't work without it!

Scissors - Self explanatory but necessary. 

Box cutter with extra blades - For cutting seamless, and opening boxes. 

Wire cutters - For cutting wire or anything we can't cut with scissors. 

Clippers - For cutting flower stems. 

Flathead screw driver - We use this to attach the cable block to our camera as well as open the outlets in our floors. 

Phone tripod - We keep this on our cart so we remember to set up our phone to shoot bts images and videos. 

Gaft tape - It's always helpful to have a variety of tape for different purposes, this one is really strong so we use it when we're suspending objects or when we need to tape down cords. 

Painters tape - Less strong but also won't damage painted surfaces. 

Scotch tape - For smaller objects.

Double sided tape - We sometimes use this in place of putty but it's definitely not as strong. 

Paint brush - For cleaning the set, especially when working with things that are crumbly. 

Gloves - To keep fingerprints off of the objects. We actually hate the gloves that are currently on our cart (weird texture and they tear easily) and will be ordering these ones next. 

Tether cable - To connect our camera to the monitor. I recommend having a backup because we've had a cable fail before. 

Tether block - To protect the camera port in case the tether cord gets pulled for any reason. 

Speaker - For some good tunes or a true crime podcast when shooting haha. The one we have is Arabela's old one, but I have my eye on this cuter one for the future hehe. 

That's everything! Is there anything you have on your cart that we're missing? Let me know below!

Is it the weekend yet?
Elle