I moved to New York from Bosnia in 2018, and a year later I rented a 500 square foot room in Brooklyn and put a camera in it. Naming it was easy. Nula is zero in Bosnian, and that was more or less where I was.
People often guess it's an acronym, or Latin, or someone's initials. It's just the word for where this began. Everything since has come from clients who trusted a small studio with their products, and from the people who've worked here alongside me. The name is still on the corner of the building, and it still reminds me of that.
The name turned out to describe the work as well as the start. A shoot begins in an empty white room — no set, nothing in the frame, no decision made yet. Whatever ends up in the picture is built from nothing: the light, the angle, where the product sits, what gets taken away again.
2019 One rented room in Brooklyn. Five hundred square feet, one sweep, two lights, one person shooting. Every room after it was paid for by the work that came out of the one before.
2021 Four rooms, and the work had changed as well as the volume. Clients who came for product on white started asking for campaigns, something built rather than simply lit. On-white stayed the backbone; custom sets became the other half of what we do.
.avif)
2022 A robot arm for motion control. The least romantic purchase in the studio’s history, and the one that changed the work most. The arm repeats one move exactly, so the hundredth shoe in a catalog is framed, angled and lit like the first.
2024 Our own software, so a brand has one place to work from: request a shoot, follow it to delivery, and keep its spec on file so it never has to be re-explained. Have a look at the dashboard.
.webp)
Today Ten studios across four locations in Brooklyn, cycloramas big enough for a crew and a moving camera, several shoots on any given day, and hundreds of brands across the US shipping product here, from apparel brands sending ghost mannequin runs to footwear and jewelry labels. We are still adding studios and improving the software, for the same reason as in the first room: the next job comes from the last one.
The hard part is the two hundredth. Same angle, same light, same white, months later, when the first run has sold through and a new colorway has to sit beside it on the same grid without looking like it was shot somewhere else. Whether it's a ghost mannequin run of forty jackets or a shoe range in six colorways, that is the problem this studio is built around.
Four answers, and not one of them is about which camera we own.
Curved cycloramas, so there is no seam and no corner — and a rack of around twenty paper colors beside them. The same sweep, lit the same way, whether the shot is today or a reshoot in March.
Capture is tethered to a monitor in the room. A soft frame or a crooked hem is caught while your product is still in front of the lens — not three weeks later, by you.
For a range in six colorways, the arm repeats the identical move over every one. People are better at styling and worse at doing the same thing forty times.
Consistency is not a styling achievement. It is a machine doing the same thing a hundred times.
We built the client dashboard for this. Templates and image preferences are saved on your account — format, background, size, margins — so the spec that shot the first order is the spec that shoots the next. Consistency holds across the brand, production starts without a briefing, and you stop writing the same email.
A studio with one room photographs your range when it has a gap. We built the studios so the date you need is the date you get — and so a repeat order can go back onto the same set it was shot on the first time.
Starting from zero is also how you learn what a first order feels like.
Most of the brands we photograph are somewhere we have been. That is the reason the first shot is free and nothing is owed on it — not a marketing device, just the offer we would have wanted in our own first year. Send one product, see how it comes back, and decide after that.
You are welcome at the studio, and most clients never come — they ship the products in and download the images. Either is normal.
