Photography business ”as green as possible"

[Maira Fravel]

When we have our photo shoot in our studio, we always try to use natural light as much as possible to cut energy costs. Although, we still want to add ways towards power consumption and to monitor our real time energy usage. Could you share a new approach that will help us with improving and updating our entire energy management process in our photography business?

 

[Karim D. Ghantous]

IMHO, the hardware that people use today is very efficient. You don't have to make a huge effort. For example, computers like the Mac mini are very efficient, if you don't need outright performance. Lights are now LEDs (and you can put dimmers on them). Monitors are LCDs. Hard drives and SSDs are very efficient compared to 10 years ago.

The only thing that you can do to improve this is to turn off all your appliances at night, especially at the outlets (or the power board).

 

[Frank Glencairn]

If you spend 5.000 bucks, you could save maybe 50 a year (if you are lucky) - forget it doesn't make any sense.

 

[L. Langer]

If you have a studio, use LED lighting everywhere. On the computing side of things, you can use low-rotational speed HDDs or SSDs and upgrade your workstations to newer, energy-efficient hardware. Using rechargeable batteries in your flashes is one easy thing to do.

 

[Brendan H. Banks]

The concepts of saving money and being environmentally friendly are most commonly at odds as we're still, at least in the US, transitioning over. I put some serious time and energy into figuring out how to have a nice mix of being more environmentally friendly and saving money at our current studio. Smart thermostat, smart switches, and a few other gadgets really help. Now that it's summer, we need to keep our 4th floor studio cool and that means we're running the AC...but we're using the temperature from the smart thermostat to trigger the smart switches for our window AC units. This helps save cost and keep things a bit more on the green side. We also draw a shade over our large skylight when not shooting to keep the place cooler.

In terms of gear...well that's where things really get to be at odds, but as others have mentioned using LED panels can be really helpful. Also just shutting off the lines to your charging stations at night, booting down or hibernating computers, etc all really help.

 

[Waltraud Mowen]

It's really hard to control the usage especially in your business. You use high quality and energy consuming lights. I agree with the use of LED lights. I'm just not sure if it will have the same effects.