Episode 10 brings Jason Hamilton to the podcast, a guest with more than 30 years in the industry and a career that runs from press photography in Australia to Senior Director of Imaging Operations at Bed Bath & Beyond. Rich Summers talks with him about what changes when a photographer steps behind the scenes to lead a team, what running a 12-bay studio operation actually looked like day to day, and where he sees AI and CGI genuinely heading for home and furniture brands.

Where Jason is now

Jason has stepped back behind the camera for part of his working week, shooting product stills and video for a small studio team he is also helping rebuild process and best practice for. The rest of his time is spent consulting across a handful of very different clients: a fashion retailer narrowing down an AI image evaluation from six vendors to two, and two home décor and furniture companies at different stages of exploring what AI could mean for their product photography, one just starting to scope it out, the other already moving five hundred to a thousand AI-generated images into production.

From photojournalist to studio lead

Jason's path started in press photography in Australia, training that mixed daytime work as a photojournalist with evening classes built entirely around studio lighting and technique. Freelance fashion and product work followed, then food photography, and a move to New York not long after the financial crash. A portfolio review at One Kings Lane led to an on-the-spot job offer, with a warning from the style director that has stuck with him ever since: she was giving him the opportunity, and he was not to waste it.

What started as a few days a week shooting vignettes and small lifestyle sets grew into full-time freelance work, then a staff role, then leadership of the whole team. Jason asked for that leadership role directly, telling the style director that if anyone was going to manage the team, it had to be him. Within a couple of years he was managing twelve photographers and had stopped shooting altogether to run photo, post-production, and production as one function. When Bed Bath & Beyond acquired One Kings Lane and folded the studio into a shared internal agency serving multiple brands, Jason ended up leading the design and build of a purpose-built 25,000 square foot studio with twelve shooting bays.

Letting go of the camera

Rich asked what it was like giving up a camera he had picked up at the age of eight to lead instead. Jason's answer was that he did not fully register the shift for several years, because his influence on set never really went away. Photographers would wait for his read on a shot before moving on, and he became known for catching details as small as a crooked lampshade on screen.

That background is also what he leans on now as a consultant. Walking onto someone else's set, he knows he is being sized up, and he meets it by being upfront: he has shot the same hours, felt the same pressure, and knows exactly what corners get cut under deadline. He comes in treating the team as peers rather than subjects to audit, learning their process end to end before forming any view on what is working and what is not.

Running a 12-bay studio

At Bed Bath & Beyond, Jason's team covered four verticals typical of a studio this size: production, operations, execution (photographers, stylists, digital techs, assistants), and post-production for both stills and video. On any given day the studio ran ten to sixteen sets across two sites, a 25,000 square foot full floor in SoHo and a smaller space tucked behind the maintenance garage at the company's New Jersey headquarters.

Output at that scale was substantial. A single silo set could shoot twenty to forty products a day across required angles, alongside vignette sets and full room builds, sometimes stretching across two bays for layouts resembling a hallway leading into another room. None of it used carpenters. The studio ran on a 40-foot wall library of flats, a dedicated furniture storage room roughly the size of an apartment, and a props master Jason describes as a three-dimensional Tetris master for how tightly he could pack a space while still leaving room to wheel an eight-seater table through it.

A full-time team of around 25 to 30 people was supplemented by a rotating group of freelancers booked months ahead, with some photographers in three days a week on a standing basis. Every item that appeared in an image, down to accessories not technically for sale, carried a SKU or barcode in the metadata, so a search for something as specific as a pink bath towel would surface every lifestyle and closet image it appeared in, not just the product shot.

What throws a wrench in the schedule

With sets booked six to eight weeks out and samples expected to check in four weeks ahead of a shoot, the real disruption came from projects that bypassed that process entirely. A marketing manager forgetting to flag an upcoming campaign, or a request landing without the usual lead time, meant scrambling for space rather than scrambling for people, particularly when the project involved a full room set.

Jason was candid that a large part of his job was absorbing that pressure before it reached the floor. His operations manager only told him, after Jason had already left the company, how much stress had been quietly filtered out before it ever reached the team.

Advice for a new studio leader

Asked what he would tell someone stepping into a studio operation at that scale, Jason's advice centred on relationships before process. He would meet every member of a full-time team one on one to understand what motivates them, then stay close to managers on a more regular basis after that. He also made a point of attending the morning stand-ups where producers ran through which stylist, assistant, and photographer was covering which shot for the day, not because his presence was required, but because it signalled he carried the accountability for the work alongside the team doing it.

The perception problem every studio shares

Asked what single thing he would fix across every studio he advises, Jason pointed to perception, specifically how leadership sees the work. Studio output gets read as fun rather than as work, when in reality hitting hundreds of clean, on-brief images a day to a strict style guide is its own form of professionalism. He counters that perception with numbers: what the team produced in a day, what it saved, laid out in terms leadership can act on.

The flip side is perception within the team itself. Jason made space for what his team called playtime, letting people experiment once the day's work was done, from setting up odd still life tests to playing with paint dropped into water. Those sessions, born out of genuine curiosity rather than any brief, were some of the results he was proudest of.

Where AI and CGI are actually heading for home and furniture

Jason has tracked CGI in home furnishings for roughly a decade, long before the recent wave of AI tools. Where AI is changing things now is speed. A 3D-rendered product, a sofa or a lamp, can be dropped into an AI-generated room environment with far less manual CGI artistry than building that same room from scratch used to require.

He sees a meaningful difference between fashion and home in how well this works. Fashion involves drape, movement, and nuance that AI still struggles to get right. Hard goods do not need to move, and the technology gets to skip that whole category of problem. Rich made a similar point about current comfort levels: shoppers already accept AI and CGI for structural items like furniture far more readily than for anything involving a model's likeness, which is part of why adoption in home is currently running well ahead of apparel.

What a well-run studio does differently

Asked the question the podcast puts to every guest, what one thing a well-run studio does that most studios do not, Jason's answer was keeping the team happy. A studio people want to join becomes self-reinforcing: freelancers would arrive having heard from someone else that it was a good place to work, and that reputation mattered to him more than almost anything else.

The other half of it was the part nobody saw. Jason absorbed the chaos landing from leadership, the last-minute location shoots, the forgotten campaigns, before it ever reached his team, so the people actually producing the work only ever had to deal with the work itself. It is a point that echoes something Alison, the former Net-a-Porter studio director who joined an earlier episode, has said on the subject of leadership through respect rather than demand.