August Made Me Clean My Equipment Room, and It Turned Into Something Bigger

Organizing my equipment room wasn’t what I planned to write about this August. I simply wanted to clean my equipment room, but the project ended up teaching me much more than how to store camera gear.

After a shoot, my camera bags and lights land on the dining table. That’s just the routine. They live there for a couple of weeks, spreading out like they own the place, until my husband DEMANDS I put them away. So I gather it all up, march it to the equipment closet, and dump it in. Nothing’s labeled. Nothing has a home. My brain doesn’t work in “everything has its place,” it works in “everything has its pile,” so I tell myself I’ll sort it later. 

Later doesn’t come until I need my camera for a quick shot, or I’m prepping for the next job, or my husband needs to borrow my external monitor. And that’s when the real trouble starts. He rolls the monitor out, and the C-stand that’s been leaning against it since God knows when comes crashing down. Hard. Loud. Close enough to his neck to make my stomach drop. 

That happened more than once before I admitted the truth to myself. I wasn’t avoiding the equipment closet because I was busy. I was avoiding it because it had gotten so overwhelming I genuinely didn’t know where to start. My ADHD brain needed a system, and there wasn’t one, just a pile that kept growing and a husband who kept nearly getting clocked by my gear. 

So I started at the source. I opened the door, looked at the mess, and got to work. 

My Gear Room Got So Bad, Test Shoots Started Feeling Like a Chore

My creative spark didn’t die in some big dramatic way. It died in a bin of tangled cords, on a random Tuesday, over a clamp I never found. 

Okay, that’s not entirely true. There was no one clamp, no one Tuesday, no single moment I can point to and say THAT’S the day everything changed. It was smaller and sneakier than that. I’d get an idea for a test shoot, something I actually wanted to make, no client, no deadline, just curiosity. I’d get excited. And then I’d open the equipment closet door. 

And here’s the thing: opening that door started feeling like watching a horror movie through the gaps in my fingers. You know the move. You want to see what’s happening, but you also really don’t, so you peek, half-braced for a jump scare. That was me, standing in my own equipment closet, peeking at my own gear as if it might lunge at me. Which, to be fair, one time a C-stand basically did.

I never even got to the part where I was disappointed I couldn’t find what I needed. I got stuck at the peeking stage. I’d look at the mess, feel my stomach drop a little, and quietly close the door on the whole idea. Not just that shoot. The next one too. And the one after that. 

I didn’t clock it as a creative problem at first. I thought I was just busy, or tired, or between ideas. But “between ideas” doesn’t usually have a closet attached to it. Mine did. I wasn’t short on ideas. I was short on the will to go get my gear for them. 

You don’t notice a slow leak until the tire’s flat. I didn’t realize how much that closet was costing me until I noticed how many test shoots I’d planned and quietly let die before they ever started. 

The Reorganization Taught Me Something About How I Work 

Turns out you can’t Marie Kondo your equipment closet without also Marie Kondo-ing a few opinions about yourself. 

Here’s Exhibit A. I found cables in there from back when I first started as a photographer. I had to Google some of them just to figure out what the heck they even connected to. A couple of my wireless flash triggers were straight up broken, just sitting there, taking up space because they had space to take up. Which is bonkers, right?! I hoard gear the way some people hoard tupperware lids that don’t match any tupperware. 

And look, I know why I do it. Every. single. tiiiiiiiiiiime I throw something away thinking I don’t need it, the very next day I need it. That’s not a feeling, that’s a FACT, and I don’t care how many times my husband calls me a conspiracy theorist for it. There are flames around my eyes just thinking about the rebuy. You throw it out, the universe waits exactly one day, and then makes you go BUY A NEW ONE. I said what I said. 

Exhibit B, the labeling. My friend Ana came through to help, and Ana is a Type A Virgo in the most glorious, terrifying way. She labeled errrrrrthannng. Every single thing. I thought we were going to run out of label tape. I’m a Virgo too, Type B though, which apparently means I like the idea of organization way more than I like actually doing it. You will not catch me losing sleep over where the paperclips go. But I can’t even judge myself here, because this is exactly why I was drowning in that closet to begin with. First time around, I didn’t label a darn thing, and my ADHD brain forgot the plan within a week. YEESH. 

I used to create because I had to, back in my girl boss era, the “those who want it, work for it, lose sleep for it” mentality. These days I’m way more protective of my energy than that. I care about building an environment that actually feeds my creativity instead of one I have to fight my way through just to reach it. Call it new-age Enya crap if you want. It works.

If This Sounds Familiar, Let’s Talk 

August has a way of making me think about change. Not the New Year’s resolution kind, the quieter kind. The kind where you look at your space, or your process, or your business, and go, huh, this doesn’t fit anymore. 

My equipment room is clean now. I can take a deep breath. I can create again. More importantly, no hazards when pulling equipment out. 

I keep wondering how many other people are standing in their own version of that room right now, whether it’s an actual room or just a way of doing things that’s overdue for a shake-up. 

If that’s you, and something in your life or your business is shifting right now, I’d love to hear about it. Tell me what’s changing for you.