Background: Having consistent, high-quality clinical photography is a cornerstone of any plastic surgery practice. This requires a convenient, simple and cost-effective setup that is versatile and can be applied to many clinical scenarios. The professional photographic studio setup is the gold standard to which all other photographic methods are compared, but is expensive, cumbersome, and at times, impractical.

Objective: The authors introduce the “Kid’s studio” method of clinical photography, which produces high-quality clinical photographs with the use of simple, easily available equipment that can be found in most clinics. Then compare quality of photos taken from Kid’s studio with photos taken from standard studio setup and the other two techniques commonly used by most plastic surgeons (on-camera flash photography and conventional non-flash photography).

Material and Method: Twenty subjects were enrolled (9 males and 11 females). Each subject was photographed in each of the four photographic setups, in six standard positions. For each subject, photos taken in the same posture with each of the different setups were randomly arranged and printed on the same photographic paper. Three evaluators were recruited and asked to rate the quality of the photos, according to all image characteristics (color, brightness & clarity, facial detail, background, shadow, depth of field and overall image quality). The score of each image was marked on the 10-cm visual analog scale, which 0 = worst and 10 = best image quality.

Results: Overall quality scores of Kid’s studio, flash setup and ordinary setup were 8.98±0.75, 6.8±0.77 and 5.17±1.13, respectively. The mean scores of all image characteristic subcategories (i.e. color, brightness & clarity, background, facial detail, shadow, depth of field) of Kid’s studio were highest, followed by flash setup and ordinary setup.

Conclusion: The authors introduce the “Kid’s studio” method of clinical photography, which produces high-quality clinical photographs with the use of simple, easily available equipment that can be found in most clinics. As compared with other methods of photography such as on-camera flash photography or conventional non-flash photography, the Kid’s studio method has been demonstrated to produce consistently higher scores. As such, the authors recommend the implementation of this technique for clinical photography, in order to meet photographic standards outside of photographic studio.

Keywords: Kid’s studio, Medical photography, Plastic surgery photography, Photography