Knowing how to properly wrap cords and cables is an often overlooked, though incredibly important, skill. If you don’t wrap them correctly, you will have to deal with tangles and kinks that are bad for the life of your cords and will make them more difficult to wrap in the long run, and it looks terribly unprofessional. Your own clients may or may not notice, but if you have ambitions of working on other people’s sets, you will likely encounter some side-eye if you exhibit cord-handling ineptitude.
If you’re reading this and picturing the tangled mess of cords you own with shame, I’ve got a life-changing short tutorial to share with you. Premium Beat has put together a video demonstrating the old standby, “over and under” cord wrapping technique. It’s really as simple as it sounds, and with just a little bit of practice, you’ll be saving your cords, sanity, money, and personal image with ease.
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The tutorial is slanted to video productions, but as photographers find their professional lives more and more hybridized, pretty much all of it is applicable. Not to mention, cords are cords – whether it’s an XLR cable, extension cord, or a strobe’s power cord.
When you get a new cord, it may have some ideas of its own on how it’s going to wrap, but if you lay them in the sun for a couple hours, they will relax and more easily bend to your will.
Once they’re ready to do your bidding, the gist of it is this – wrap the cord in loops alternating between overhand and underhand.
Watch the video for the demo, and then go fix all your cords. Happy wrapping!
