Our South Fremantle Studio is now permanently closed. This was our base of operations for just under thirteen years – from September 2007 until May 2020.
In late 2019 our lease expired and the building was put up for sale by the owners. At the same time, we opened The Bird House, our Melville Studio.
In the time we were at the South Fremantle studio we completed over six thousand photo shoots for our wonderful customers.
An important part of our story, we’ll always remember it fondly.
Cooper Studio’s South Fremantle building
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Our photography studio is located in South Fremantle, in an historic area which is about 25 minutes from the Perth CBD. We have some of the best photography facilities in Western Australia, with state-of-the-art equipment in both the studio proper and in our photo editing suite. You can relax in the lounge room while waiting for your shoot to begin, or during the short wait while your photos are prepared for viewing.We have magazines and photography books to look at while you wait, and we take our coffee almost as seriously as our photography! Remember to ask for an espresso while you wait!Your photos can be viewed in our dedicated cinema, where they will be brought to life on our 130-inch projector screen with a surround sound presentation!We have parking on site at the rear of the studio (down the driveway on the South side of the building), and there is free street parking on Hampton Rd, too!How to find us: We’re right near the intersection of Hampton Rd and South St in South Fremantle. The easiest way to find us is to look for the intersection with the Shell service station on one corner and Budget Car Rentals on the other. We’re the building right next to Budget!We’re close to some great cafes and restaurants and we’re about one kilometre from the beach. So why not make a day of your visit?
Jodie and Gemma in the Cinema
A shoot in the studio
Our Building Has a Story…
Like a lot of the historic buildings in South Fremantle the original story of our studio building is lost in time (forget about plans at the local council, there are none) but we know it’s over 100 years old, charming and, like a lot of old buildings, somewhat idiosyncratic. It occasionally creaks and groans and that high step that runs all the way around the building is there to stave off floodwaters, because our stormwater drainage is from the 19th century! By the standards of this neighbourhood we’re lucky to be able to offer you off street parking, but yes, that’s someone’s house behind our studio, where you park. All I can say is it’s a Fremantle thing, so try not to worry about it!
The studio as it appeared when we opened in 2007!
We established ourselves here in 2007 after Cooper Studio (or Cooper Photography as we were known back then) outgrew the nearby corner-shop house where we were based. Immediately before moving in, it was the Cafe Landucci headquarters and the part of the building that is now the photography studio was a storage room for coffee. The whole building smelled like coffee for the first month we were here!
Ok. We look a little like an Ikea showroom. There’s a story to that too. Immediately upon signing our lease we ran into problems – namely a few years prior the council had, in it’s wisdom, rezoned the building as a house! So no businesses were allowed, we were told. Fortunately our lease contract was contingent on gaining council approval, so we continued operating in our old premises while the building’s owner tried to sort things out with council. Trouble is, we didn’t know how long this would take, or if it would happen at all, so we couldn’t organise our shop fit out. the zoning negotiations took three months and by then we only had two weeks to get in as Christmas (and the birth of Craig’s second child) were just around the corner. Hello Ikea! Basically, more or less the whole studio was put together with those little Allen keys by some very good friends over several late nights of pizza and cramps.
The studio has been modernised over the years, and it’s a bright and modern place with lots of character. We hope you will love it too!