Just as you should vary the look of your key and hair lights with softboxes, gridspots, or other modifiers, you should do the same with the background light.  Many photographers settle in to a lighting routine, especially with their background light.  After all, its only purpose is to add dimension to the image, so why spend additional time fiddling with it?

I love photographing with big soft boxes.  And I really love octabanks.  These, shallow, octagonal soft boxes give off a lovely, soft, wrapping, light, without the dramatic fall-off of a traditional rectangular soft box.  The images of the kids are made with only one light source, a traditional, Chimera, 4ft., soft box (notice the fall off on the side of the face of the young girl standing with fishnet.  An easy fix for the shadow side would have been a fill card, but I like the mysterious mood.  Metered for the main light source (the soft box) and photographed at 5.6, 125th sec.

I’ve spent some quality time with my image archives lately and I’ve come to two conclusions: 1. I really like black and white, medium format square images made on slow moderate ISO black and white film. 2. My favorite lighting tool is really just a king size, white bed sheet on a frame.

I have an ongoing project photographing images of health and fitness.  A lot of it is very straightforward; relatively flat light with a slightly darker background, also flatly lit.  It’s a great project, even with the occasional creative restraint, because it permits me to work with a wide variety of subject matter including people, food, location, even conceptual imagery, all things that I enjoy shooting.

The assignment was a tough one: I was to photograph beauty headshots of 7 current or past title holders in the Miss Hawaii USA preliminary pageants. Ok, so it doesn’t seem like a bad job and I can hear the choruses of “Aw, poor Steve” coming from across the seas! Truth be told, it was a lot of fun, but there were many logistical issues and an even more heightened need to focus on the details prior to, during, and after the shoot than I face when photographing one model at a time. The first challenge was scheduling the event.

OK. I think I have developed enough trust in my friends at www.prophotoresource.com to come clean about something: I am a light/lighting junky. I love playing with light—the more the merrier. I want to PLAY!!!!! Give me different sizes, types, color temperatures, algebraic equations, one-tenth stop differences and I’m in hog heaven! Ummm…wait…what do you mean that’s no surprise? You knew that? Well, before I get to the point of this article, here is a shot that involved a complicated set-up. I used seven lights to create the following photograph of my good friend Teresa Bringas: One softbox, two Stripdomes and four spotlights.  

OK, so what was the point of last month's math lesson? The additive nature of light helps us determine our lighting ratios. The following excerpt from my Fashion and Glamour lighting book examines this relationship

Small, portable flashes are great. Every photographer should have two or three stuffed into his or her equipment case, along with enough fresh batteries to pull off a good set up shot. But when it comes to shooting interior architecture I always bring along a case or two of the big lights. I used to shoot interiors not too long ago with a four by five inch view camera and sheet film. With that kind of cameras, shooting during daylight hours, you generally needed all the extra light you could drag along. And old habits die hard

A number of years ago I was wandering through the isles of my local Barns and Nobles book store, in search for new photographic ideas.  I think I looked at every fine art book, every fine art photography book, and even the fashion books trying to see the world differently than I was at the time.One book that caught my eye was a book by the famous movie star photographer of the 30's George Hurrell.

There continues to be a lot of interest in the use of strobes outdoors from ProPhotoResource community. However, there has recently been some inquiries about using Litepanels--with and without strobes--to modify outdoor light. The following are excerpts from my book Master Lighting Techniques for Outdoor and Location Digital Portrait Photography. The captions and images used have been reorganized to fit the purpose of this article.  

Dear readers, this is my first contribution to ProPhotoResource.com and I’m thrilled to share a chunk of cyberspace with such a distinguished group of photographer/writers. I’ll be writing about lighting on location and the use of small, battery powered lights to do the kinds of projects that used to require lots of heavy, studio lighting gear.

As much as I’m a high-tech guy, I’m low-tech, too. I believe in having the right equipment for the job, but I’ll be the first to admit a professional love for cheap tricks. My Reverse Cookie which I wrote about in my book, Master Lighting Guide for Portrait Photographers and the Bookend Bounce Panel , which you can find in the InfoCenter at ShootSmarter.com are two examples of simple, inexpensive materials used in new and visually exciting ways to produce a photographic look unlike that from any commercial product.