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Professional Lighting for $20
Achieving professional results shooting on location.

Are you often disappointed when you view photographs of friends or family? Do you find yourself making excuses for dark shadows, or bright areas that blow out any detail? Have you looked at your vacation photos and thought, "Man, that was my only chance to get a picture of Aunt Martha at the Grand Canyon and she looks awful!"?

If any of those questions hit home, this article will help. I'm going to share the techniques professional photographers use on location to create the images you see in magazines everyday. You know, the kind of images that you look at and wonder why yours can't look that way. Know what? They can. And, best of all; It's easy and it doesn't take a huge investment in lighting and camera equipment.
As an example I'm going to use a little photo shoot I did a few days ago. I wanted some pictures of a bride that were something more than what is normally seen. Something other than stiff studio portraits, something that would capture her personality, feel like something out of a fashion magazine, and be fun.
The only time we had available was mid day, just before noon. Which happens to be possibly the worse lighting conditions for shooting people outside. But it was the only choice we had, so we had to do the best we could. I knew from experience, that contrary to popular belief and what many amateur oriented articles may recommend, I had to keep her out of the direct sunlight. The old adage; Keep the sun over your shoulder and shining onto the subjects face, is a sure fire recipe for a terrible shot.
So let's take this photo session apart and see what we did to achieve the results I wanted with the conditions we had to work with. If you go to www.willoart.com/Christina you'll see a short slideshow of a few of the pictures from this shoot. The slideshow is a bit fast, but at the end you'll come to a gallery view which will make it easier to study the shots. We used two different lighting techniques to achieve these shots. Both are very simple, one is absolutely free, and the other may cost you $20 if you decide to build what you need.
Let's begin with the three shots of Christina lying in the grass. The lighting looks nice, doesn't it? It's soft, compliments her skin tones, and brings out the colors nicely. People would tend to think since it was taken by a "professional", there was a lot of fancy equipment involved. You want to know what that "professional" equipment

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