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My photographic studio space is undergoing a tiny bit of a make over, and as a result, I'm currently limited to completing work outdoors. Soon, though, at some point in the future, I'll have the room ready to go again, and when that's the case, I'll need to implement a few solutions for holding up backdrops.

In my old set up, I had a curtain rod on brackets, drilled straight into the drywall (or plasterboard as we call it in Australia). The brackets were flimsy keyed inserts to screws mounted in the wall... and the brackets moved more often than I'd like.

I had a backdrop stand, which was portable, but I stopped using it on account of the small amount of space that I had in the room.

Since then, a few things have changed. On Saturday, I got a new lens. The new lens is the Nikon Z Mount 105mm f/2.8, which has a minimum focusing distance of 29cm. This means I can have a shorter working distance between the camera and the subject, and it also means that I can have more space for lights outside the field of view.

Here's a technical drawing to what I'm leaning toward for my "new" set up.

Each line represents a certain length of aluminium tubing - and the connectors are various sizes / shapes.

It also means that I can store some more things behind the backdrop if I choose to do so.

So that gives me three potential options:

1. Use the cheap, shitty commercially available backdrop stands I have now until they catastrophically break and fail:

1. When it fails, use the existing curtain rod solution, deployed in a slightly different manner...

or,

1. Spend $210 (or more) on aluminum tubes and build my own modular, portable contraption that enables me to reconfigure a backdrop stand as I require.

The only downside is that the connectors for the solution I'm looking at are not all that robust.

The one downside (and advantage, probably) is that I don't know how to weld bare lengths of metal together. That's good for keeping me safe, but not so good to my ambition to build ludicrously robust structures engineered to do nothing more than hold bits of heavy fabric, curtain, paper, and potentially some lights.