A Peek Inside Our Langley Photography Studio
If you’ve been following along, you’ll already know where our name came from, so we won’t make you read that story again. Instead, we thought we’d show you what “Not Normal” actually looks like behind the scenes. Spoiler alert… It’s probably not what you’d expect from a photography studio.
Walk through the doors of our Langley photography studio and you’ll quickly realise this isn’t a space designed just to look pretty. Everything has a place. But almost everything also has a possibility. The studio is designed to create. And very little in here is just decoration.
There’s a vintage traffic light on the wall. A green chair. A 1970s television. An antique telephone. We’ve brought in drums. We’ve had basketballs bouncing around. And we’ve discovered, quite accidentally, that our giant dice definitely do not bounce. The traffic light has made its way off the wall and into photographs. A basketball has become part of a portrait. The old television that normally sits quietly in the studio was pulled into a shoot just last week. That’s how things tend to work around here.
We rarely look at something and think only about what it is. We wonder what it could become. And that applies to the whole studio.
Furniture gets moved. Chairs disappear from one side of the room and reappear in a set on the other. Props come down from walls. Lighting gets rebuilt. Sometimes we completely rearrange a section of the studio to create one particular photograph. It might take a bit longer to set everything up than it does to actually photograph it. And sometimes? We’ll move half the studio around for five minutes of photography. Then, when we have the shot, everything goes straight back where it belongs. If we can see the photograph in our heads, we want to find out if we can create it.
Sometimes that starts with careful planning. Sometimes it starts because someone spots something in the studio and says, “What about that?” A light gets moved. A chair gets dragged over. Something comes off the wall. And suddenly we're creating a photograph that wasn't necessarily part of the plan five minutes earlier.
Occasionally, experimentation also teaches us important lessons. Like the aforementioned giant dice. During one session, a client decided to try juggling them. One hit the floor. CRACK! One broken dice later, we can now confidently add “not suitable for juggling” to its list of specifications.
It’s not about being different simply for the sake of being different. It’s about being curious enough to ask: What if?
Even the studio itself has been built around the way we work. The floor is covered with foam flooring because spending eight or ten hours standing on concrete isn’t much fun. When it’s time to roll out seamless backdrop paper, we simply lift sections of the floor so everything sits perfectly flat. It’s probably not how most photography studios are designed. It works perfectly for ours.
And then… There’s Martha. Every morning starts exactly the same way. I walk into the studio and say, “Hi, Martha.” Martha is a mannequin. She originally joined the team as a lighting and posing stand-in before clients arrived. Now she’s become something much bigger. She’s part of the family. Everyone who visits our studio—whether they’re having professional headshots, branding photos, family portraits or simply stopping by—is invited to sign Martha. And they do.
Martha is covered in signatures. Her shoulders. Her legs. Her ankles. The back of her head. Even her butt cheeks. Our goal is simple. One day, we hope there won’t be a single inch of her left unsigned. She proudly wears lipstick, some very questionable ink “makeup,” and an ever-changing collection of hats. One day it’s a mirrored disco cowboy hat. The next it’s a Santa hat with a crown balanced on top. She’s always dressed in Not Normal apparel. She stands in front of our huge floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking 206th Street, quietly watching the world go by. We’ve even had neighbours tell us they wave to Martha when they walk past. We’re not entirely convinced they realise she’s a mannequin. Either way… She’s become the unofficial third member of our team.
If Hayley’s in the studio, chances are there’s music playing. Always. Creating without music just doesn’t seem right. And if the right song comes on… Well… We’ve been known to dance around the studio like nobody’s watching. The only problem is somebody usually is. One entire wall of our studio is glass. More than once we’ve looked up mid-dance to see people in the condos across the street laughing, waving…or dancing along with us. We like to think we’re bringing a little joy to the neighbourhood.
Working together as a mother-and-daughter team also requires a very sophisticated conflict resolution process. Rock. Paper. Scissors. We even have a sign in the studio to prove it. It’s settled more disagreements than we’d probably like to admit. Although I’m still convinced Hayley has somehow worked out how to cheat.
We laugh. A lot. At ourselves. At each other. At the ridiculous situations we somehow find ourselves in, especially set building. But underneath all of that is something we take very seriously... The photography.
Hayley has an incredible ability to notice details that most people walk straight past. It’s something you’ll see in her street photography, and it’s something she brings into every portrait session. We plan carefully. We obsess over light. We move things by inches. Or, occasionally, we move half the furniture. We experiment. We change our minds. We try things just to see what happens.
Whether we're creating professional headshots, branding photography, portraits or something completely custom, the studio gives us the freedom to build, experiment and create something that fits the person in front of the camera.
Because some of our favourite photographs have started with a very simple question: What if we tried this?
None of this was created as a branding exercise. Martha wasn’t part of a marketing strategy. The traffic light wasn’t bought because it matched our brand. We didn't put foam on the floor because it would make an interesting blog post. And we definitely didn't sacrifice a giant dice for content.
This is simply how our studio has evolved. It’s a working creative space filled with things that inspire us, things that make us laugh and things that might become part of a photograph when the right person walks through the door.
So if you ever visit our photography studio in Langley, don’t be surprised if you’re introduced to Martha before you meet the rest of us… if something hanging on the wall suddenly becomes part of your photograph… if the furniture starts moving (on purpose!)… if music is playing… if a dance party breaks out… or if an important decision is settled with a game of rock, paper, scissors. And if you happen to spot the giant dice… Please don’t juggle it.
To us, that’s just another normal day at Not Normal Photography. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.
