How to create your hand made distressed look floor boards for newborn photography

22/04/2019
Posted by Sissi Wang

Around this time in 2018, we have decided to move into a rental studio for my photography business. I was super excited since we had room to put up some real wooden floors.

Hubby and I found this timber yard online. We drove across entire Sydney to here looking for some rustic look floor boards. My objective was simple yet complicated.

The floor area needs to be at least 2m long and 1.5 wide. In my past experience, we made 1.2m wide and didn’t work out well the focal distance put me off and the length was 1.5m which restricted my frame too. Larger area means less post production in cropping/photoshop those unwanted backgrounds.
he wood cannot be too coarse, considering the safety fact that baby would sit/step on.
Light weight, meaning the thickness of each plank must not be over 20mm. Too thick makes laying them a muscle job.
Grain grain grain! chips, dirt, color variations all doesn’t matter as long as they look rustic.

We were lucky enough to find the planks meet all the above criteria. They had lots of planks in random sizes, so we picked the good looking ones and worked out the amount we needed.

Trying to recall what I did before since it was about 12 months ago my memory faded quite a bit.

We washed, sanded, then stained with timber stain (forgot what shade we went with, possibly ‘oak’?) to give a universal tone. The ones on the floor we just lay them directly onto the tiles, but the backdrop goes onto the wall we had to nail them into the wall for safety purpose.

Look how they turn out in my camera…

These planks were previous solid wood floorboards from demolition sites. So they come from different places. Many of them cannot be interlocked together therefore makes some gaps wider than the others as you can see from the above pictures. These are the very yummy details we like in the old planks.

Last month, we moved into a new larger studio where I need some cream wooden floor boards. Unfortunately the timber yard we went to this time didn’t have the ones we got last year. I hated having to drive another 20km to the other side of the city, so this time I just wanted to give something else a go.

See what I do and how I achieve, stay tuned in my next post…