Studio

The Building.
In order to film Plants, mushrooms, and other exotic subjects you need a workspace. I had the pleasure of building a studio right next to my house a few years ago with this sort of work in mind. Not only is it fully insulated with advanced environmental control, It hosts plenty of electrical capability and I even built in a fresh air exchange system to keep the plants and subjects nice and comfortable, with a main room and a back room in order to accommodate multiple environments for optimal conditions for the subjects.

Six Stations
I have a total of six shooting stations, each with an advanced multi-axis motion controlled camera platform. Day and night can be set to mimic the sunrise/sunset times of any place in the planet at any time of year. These systems orchestrate all the lighting sequences to shut off the grow lights before capturing an image. Each station has individual power backups with power off battery rather than the mains for super stable performance. All images are taken from the camera to the hosting PC with instant off-PC backup preventing potential issues from a failed drive or memory card.

Advanced Remote monitoring
In order to keep things running smoothly, I have deployed IT systems that alert me to computer updates, power outages, network outages, failed image captures, unexpected temperature fluctuations, etc. I also have the ability to run all of these robots remotely, and even fix most issues on the fly without having to step foot into the studio. If something seems to be going wrong, I even have a myriad of data loggers throughout the studio capturing metrics by the minute on light, temperature, and humidity to help troubleshoot in case a plant seems to be suffering.

Why all of this?
All of these advancements and implementations have been put in place to maximize chances of success. Nothing is worse than having a shoot running nicely just to wake up and find out the power went out and everything shut down. This being an one man operation, I have found it to be imperative to ensure that I have as many safety mechanisms running as possible.