At first glance: a simple, one-light portrait of activist gardener Janssen Evelyn.

Dig deeper: a look at tonal mapping via specular highlights, stretching the range of your modestly powered flash, and how to discover your next project.

My summer project this year was a series of portraits to help mark the 30th anniversary of the Howard County (MD) Conservancy. Humid heat and mosquitoes aside, it was a fantastic way to spend some outdoor time in a COVID-safe environment and help to promote the conservancy at the same time.

As a bonus, I met some fantastic people and have since picked up several new projects as a result. More on that a little later.

The Simple Light

The lighting could hardly be simpler for Evelyn, seen above, an avid gardener who by day works in the executive branch of our local county government. I am using a Godox AD200 in bare bulb mode and fitted with an R08 warming gel. The light is in a 3x4' soft box, and placed very close to Evelyn — right over my left shoulder. It's as close as I can get it without being inside of the frame.

There are a couple of good reasons for that. First, I'm competing with the late evening sun, which is coming in from low camera far right. So I need the punch from the 200ws "magnum" version of a speedlight.

But there's another reason I am in so close. I want a specific quality of light. I am pushing the AD200 through a pretty big (and inefficient) soft box. Because I need those square inches — and close proximity — to create a large, subdued specular highlight.

That specular translates as a lustrous glow on Evelyn's face. Which, combined with the near wide open shooting aperture (f/1.8) creates a smooth palette that belies the small APS-C chip in my Fuji X-Pro2.

Can you see the specular highlight in his face? 

Here, let's zoom in:

Better? (If you still can't see it, try squinting your eyes.)

That's my soft box, reflected symmetrically, smack in the middle of his face. The area around the highlight is also lit, but that is a diffused highlight. This diffused highlight is much closer to the true tonality of Evelyn's face.

The reflected soft box — AKA the specular highlight — is a higher tone that I can lay on top of that diffused highlight to help to pull your eye into the entry point of the photo.

You might notice a smaller, brighter specular on his nose. Same surface texture, same light source, same distance. Why is this brighter?

This is because of the topography of this area of his face. That, along with shadow, is how light reveals form.

The Hand-Off

I mentioned above that my flash is competing with the ambient sunlight. In the end, the competition ended in a tie. Which is to say the exposure values for each of those two light sources are about the same. 

This creates a sort of "hand-off" that occurs as you travel around his face toward camera right that gives a wrapped, sort of 3-D feel. It is not so much cross-lighting as it is frontal light wrapping into side light.

Often the default choice for dealing with flash and sunlight is to tend to want to overpower the sun. This is because our flash usually has the better quality of light. But if the sun is being good to you, you can always let it share the load. Or, as we'll see in a minute, you can also let it get top billing.

Stretching Your Flash

Overpowering full sunlight with a small or modest flash often requires that we use hard light, or move in close, or both. It's just physics and the power limitations that come with easy portability.

But again, if the sunlight is of decent quality, we can always choose to let our flash play second fiddle. This means we get to either move our flash back (for more available range) or power down for a faster recycle.

My sunlight is coming from camera right. So we'll use the sun as our key and drop our flash exposure down to an appropriate level for fill light. This will give us the control that allows us to smooth out our tonal range. 

Like this:

Without my fill light, Evelyn's shadow areas would be mostly illegible. Because of the shifted ambient exposure, my garden environment (which, full disclosure, I have lightened up in post in both images) also brightens up.

In this sense, my flash becomes a very controllable fill light. I can alter the quality, quantity or direction.

But I could also use this to stretch out my working range if my light was right at the edge (in terms of distance) of being able to compete with the sun. For instance, I could shoot a small group of people in this light by using one smallish light in a soft box as fill. Since it doesn't have to give me a full exposure, I could work with it further back. Then I could use a harder (and more efficient) second small light as my key to finish the job off.

This is especially helpful to know when using high-speed sync, which can become very inefficient as you walk up the shutter speed range to get that creamy, wide-open aperture.

If you want to retain your full available power from your flash for matching the sun, it's more efficient to use standard (ie, non-HSS) flash and a neutral density filter.

But when living on the edge (ie, shooting in the sun with a small flash) using a light as a soft fill and adding in a hard key is a great solution when needed.

Your Next Project

For so many reasons, always take the time to talk to and learn about the people in front of your camera. The experience of meeting a steady stream of interesting people is perhaps the very best thing about being a photographer. 

For instance, one of the things I learned about Evelyn is that he was once photographed by Sally Mann. 

Yeah, that Sally Mann. 

Fortunately, I learned this particular tidbit well after the shoot had been completed. Otherwise I would have been mortally intimidated by association. There are some things it is just better not to know when you are photographing someone.

But what I did learn during our shoot was that Janssen lends his gardening chops to the Howard County chapter of the NAACP, where he works with local youth. As someone who sees the value in gardening, he has a program designed to reconnect kids to the land so they can better understand — and elevate the quality of — their food.

Am I interested in helping a program like that with photography if at all possible? Absolutely. Is this the exact technique I used to find the majority self-generated stories over the 20 years I spent as a staff photojournalist? 

Again: absolutely.

If you pay attention, this happens more often than not. In fact, through the process of photographing ten people for the conservancy, I now have half a dozen potential future projects that have stemmed from the conversations we had during our shoots.  

Don't Miss the Big Picture

Yes, this is a lighting site. On one level this is a one-light shoot, warmed up soft box, yada yada. On another level we can talk about where the soft box was positioned exactly as it was, and why. And further, how we can balance (above, equal, or below) our flash with the sunlight.

But much more important than how you design your lighting is: how do you explore your path as a photographer? 

Ideas are far-and-away the most valuable commodities we possess. And like any good gardener, we should always be finding, planting and nurturing our ideas for the next photo project.

This article was published as an entry in the Strobist Lighting Cookbook. New articles and how-to's appear monthly. To receive notifications for new posts, you can follow via email or via Instagram.

Sunset Bush Light

But if we grab an available light shot, (i.e., no flash at all) you can see how dark it really is under the canopy. So we are obviously gonna need some other light in there:

I'll need to illuminate the whole tree to make my key light more believable. So let's move around to the left and set up a fill light: 

To light the tree evenly, we'll need to move the fill light pretty far back. So let's walk across the gravel road at camera left and set up our second light — another e640 in a medium-sized soft box.

Whenever you have control over the time of day in which you'll be shooting a location portrait, always remember that the hour that wraps around sunset will offer you at least five different lighting environments in which to work. 

And for today's portrait of birders Jo (left) and Bob Solem, we're going to use three of them.

I photographed the Solems for the Howard County Conservancy as part of a campaign for their 30th anniversary. We did a total of eleven portraits of patrons of the conservancy, all shot outdoors. The project was a great way to spend an otherwise socially distanced summer during the COVID pandemic.

We shot mostly in July, which meant that many of the sessions were done in oppressively hot weather. So when it was practical to do so, shooting at sunset helped to take the edge off in addition to giving good light possibilities.

What Time Should We Be There?

If I am in control of the time, I usually aim for the subject to arrive 30 minutes before sunset. This will give us time to chat and get a little bit acquainted before the fist zone of light presents itself. 

Ideally, I have arrived thirty minutes beforehand and have my lights assembled and loosely set up. Since I don't usually work with assistants, this leave me free to try to keep the subjects relaxed and maybe develop a little rapport before we start shooting.

For the Solems, the latter was totally unnecessary as they are both very chill and happy-go-lucky. They showed up looking totally the part, each sporting the exact model of Domke photo vest I well remember from my college days.

Instead, it was their back-and-forth banter that put me at ease, and instantly admiring the great marriage they have obviously built together as they approach their 60th anniversary.

My main thought was that given the heat, I did not want to stretch them too much. We'd keep the pace reasonable. Shoot time, relax and chat a little bit. Should work out fine. 

Zone One: Golden Light

Our first lighting environment will be taking advantage of the golden light that arrives about 15 minutes before sunset. Sunset is at 8:32pm for this night (always check!) So I grab a few frames while we are chatting.

Important to remember: if nothing else works tonight, we are covered. We already have something good in the can (an expression from the old film days) and no one can take that away from you.

Having these frames gives me two things. One, I can relax because I know I am not gonna get blanked. And two, you can say something like, "Oh, this one looks nice," and turn the camera around to show them.

Remember, they have no idea how they are going to look. And this first version looks pretty cool — a little cinematic, almost like something from an old western. Which in turn de-stresses them a bit as well.

So very quickly (before we lose the light) we are going to turn things around and shoot into this golden light.

Zone Two: Into the Sun

Since my lights are pre-staged, it's quick and easy to position my key light (a Paul Buff Einstein 640 in a 47" Octa) to light against this sunset.

I'm also using a fill light here — a second e640 in a strip light. But it is dialed waaay down. I am not even sure it is contributing much. It's mostly preset there for the post sunset photo when we'll really need it.

When shooting into pre-sunset golden hour, you can often get away with just one light. Yes, it is still going to leave some black in the shadows. But if I angle everything right, the sun itself is going to create some Michael Bay-sian flare and wrap up in there. So it should all work out.

In fact, here the sun is doing some cool things for me. In addition to the nice flare, it is also backlighting the grasses nicely and defining the edges of their pants. That internal contrast also helps to make a fill light unnecessary. The sun is also nuking Jo's ID case in her camera left pocket, which I could do without. But I missed that while shooting.

In terms of exposure here I am going to be in full manual mode, and not using the aperture priority sunset hack to automatically keep track of my ambient exposure. This is because how I position the sun (mostly whether I hide it behind them or not) will greatly affect the camera's exposure choices on "A" mode.

So I just grab my ambient exposure, and adjust my key light to match the aperture. Well, make that almost match. Because if you look at the frame, you can see that my key light is maybe a stop underexposed.

Why is that? Because even though it is lit, I want the photo to look more like the way your eye would see it. Your eye would still discern detail in the Solems, even though you were looking right into the sun. The camera, without the added flash, would not be able to see this contrast range. With the exposure level for my flash, I am kinda splitting the difference to bridge the perceptual gap between your eye and your camera.

Also, I've stuck a 1/2 CTO warming gel on the flash to help to chromatically marry the key light to the late sun. I just want to get the two light sources in the same neighborhood so they track a little better. Then I'll adjust the overall color balance in post if needed. 

Zone Three: Ambient-Lit Afterglow

Just after sunset, a third lighting zone presents itself. You can use the soft, directional afterglow as a beautiful key light by just rotating your shooting direction 90 degrees. 

Note: if you are photographing a vehicle, this is almost certainly going to be your best ambient light. Just shoot with the sunset behind you, using the afterglow as your light source. With that soft, gradient light behind your shooting position, your car will reflect the light source and be an instant standout in the Craigslist ads.

And this light would look great on the Solems as well. But I am going to pass on this zone in favor of keeping the shooting pace a little more relaxed. I think this time will be better spent chatting with them and building rapport for the post-sunset shot that I am hoping will be my best version of the shoot.

Zone Four: Light Into Post-Sunset

This is the zone I am most looking forward to shoot in. As you can see above, I already have started to ready my lights even before the sun dipped below the horizon.

The lights visible in the BTS above are both a little overexposed. But you can see their positions. I'll be shooting from just above the horizontal strip light. As in, camera squishing right down into the top side of the light. I tend to like a strip light for fill, as it both wraps well and creates specular highlights in glasses that are pretty easy to hide.

By the way, here's a quick tip on specular highlights in glasses for multi light setups: They are almost always going to be there. There are easy ways to hide them when using one light source. But it is more difficult with two lights. 

Fortunately, most eyeglasses are low-reflection these days. Which means you'll get a dim reflection with a weird color cast. So I'll often lasso that reflection in post, and then use curves to both neutralize the color cast and lower the tonal value. Which is what I did here.

So, the same 1/2 CTO is on the key and I have a 1/2 CTB cooling gel on the fill. This is to create a difference in the warmth of the highlights vs. the shadows. That relative difference will carry forward even if I globally adjust the color balance afterwards. So my shadows will look more real.

Here's my final, along with a few things to think about if you'd like to build a look like this.

First, the sharp-eyed amongst you will notice there is now a third light in the mix. Remember, everything other than the sky in this photo that is not lit by flash will be pure black. So I am using a speedlight (a Godox TT600) out of frame to camera-right, in the back, to scrape the grass and erase some of that black. 

Ironically, this light will fill some of the logical visual gaps and help the photo to look less "lit."

Second, it is the fill light that makes this picture. The legibility in the shadows is key to recreating the scene in a way that feels more natural to your eye. The lushness and velvety feel in their clothing in particular (and in the shadows in general) is all down to the fill light.

Third, I love their expressions. Both the impishness and the symmetry. Right about now I am feeling good about foregoing Zone Three and instead pausing to rest and chat. That matters. If you are making good frames, and pausing to relax and chat between looks, you'll often watch as your subjects progress from being just visual pipe cleaners to full-on collaborators. 

Don't just blast away. If you find yourself doing that, consider it to be a tell that you are probably too nervous. Which surely won't help things. Take a breath. Relax. Chat. 

Remember that you only need for things to come together one time, for a fraction of a second. Create your best odds for that to happen.

Zone Five: Deep Dusk

I felt great about what we had with the Solems at this point. And they told me that they do not like to drive after dark, so I wanted to get them on their way.

But there is a final zone that can we often miss because of external reasons like the above. Shooting with with or into deep dusk can yield beautiful results. The ambient light often gets ethereal and particularly beautiful deep into dusk. And it does so in ways that our eyes cannot perceive, but a long-open shutter can pick up. 

If you have time, it is well worth sticking around to experiment with that. After all, other than time, what do you have to lose? 

Just remember two things. One, given your subject is in silhouette, your flash will become your new shutter. Don't worry about camera shake. I have shot portraits like this at two or even four seconds. Just hold reasonably still and things might turn out surprisingly great.

And two, since your subject will be in silhouette, remember to bring a small flashlight to use for focusing between frames. You'll need it.

Finally, because of the sensitivity of modern cameras, that deep afterglow can actually be a beautiful light source. All kinds of cool color is happening in blue hour. Set your camera on daylight white balance to see it for what it is.

You can see an example of the results from this technique at the end of this post.

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So, those are five different zones of light for you to explore the next time you are out shooting a portrait at sunset.

And again, I'm not saying you need to try for all five. Just always know that they are there for you.

This article was published as an entry in Strobist Lighting Cookbook. New articles and how-to's appear monthly. To receive notifications for new posts, you can follow via email or via Instagram.

Seeing as no one is doing much traveling these days, I thought it'd be fun to pay a visit with a Strobist reader photographing somewhere far away.

Up for a little Lighting Cookbook field trip to Indonesia? Yeah? Then let's go...
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Our local guide and guest photographer for this trip is Mr. Tommy Soebagjo, who divieds his time between the cities of Bekasi and Surakarta on Java, the large central island in Indonesia. Java is the economic center of the Southeast Asian nation, and features the city of Jakarta on its west end and a lot of volcanoes scattered all over the island.

That's Tommy, above, whom I discovered via Instagram. Trapped at home these days, I currently do a lot of my travel vicariously through Instagram. I follow hashtags of places I know and love, and places I can't wait to visit when all of this COVID-19 mess is over.

The former list includes places like Hanoi, Vietnam and Lisbon, Portugal. And the latter definitely includes Indonesia. I mean, how could I not want to visit there? Cool and industrious people, amazing scenery, fantastic food, and a killer Vespa modding community:

I mean, dude.

And then to top it all off, there's the ID-Strobist community. They are a super active bunch, with social get-togethers, classes, and a general vibe of people of different experience levels helping each other in all sorts of ways.

Which, through their Instagram account that I follow, is how I came across the photo above by Tommy. After I reached out to him via Instagram's messaging function, he wrote back and graciously shared some of the details of this particular outing and the resulting photo.

So let's ride along.

We're Getting Up Early

Tommy is a sculptor by trade and a photographer by avocation. He says he often leaves his house as early as 2:00am to get to a good site in time to photograph the sunrise. But for this particular morning we get to sleep in a bit, as he is not leaving until 4:00am.

Fun little aside: I have a friend, Chris Hurtt, who used to lead landscape photography workshops in the San Fransisco area. People would take them to get access to great locations and to finally learn the magic f/stop to get beautiful landscape photos.

As we all know, there is no magic f/stop. But there is a time-worn secret: get your butt out of bed really early and be in all set and in place before the other blue hour starts to happen.

There is no crowd at 5:00am. No one is gonna call the cops on you. You can pretty much shoot anywhere without a permit. Because everyone is asleep.

Seriously, at 5:00am, the world is your oyster. In the west, lots of successful photographers have started out this way, taking advantage of the cloak of early morning.

Tommy is similarly industrious. He loads his photo gear onto his Honda Vario scooter and heads out into the pre-dawn darkness from Surakarta, traveling east en route to Tawangmangu which is 25 miles away. But about 20 miles into his trip, he spots some freelance rice planters working the paddies. With one of Java's volcanoes, Mt. Lawu, serving as a backdrop.

So he stops. (And yeah, I would have stopped, too.)

It's Also About the Journey

Here's the thing. Having a camera with you is a great excuse to go up and talk to someone. Which is how you meet interesting people and learn cool things. Which in turn is how you form great memories, that you then cement with beautiful photos. What a deal.

So Tommy hops off his motorbike and strikes up a conversation with the ladies planting in the field. These ladies were happy to tell him all about what they do. As freelance rice planters, their job is to transplant the rice shoots, spaced out, into the flooded paddies by hand. During the transplanting season, they work from 5am until 11am every day. The calendar won't wait; no days off until you are finished.

Over the next three-to-four months, the rice plants fill in the gaps and finally become ready for harvest — also by hand.

One of our X-Peditions trips to Vietnam is timed to the rice harvest. Beginning to end, this is hard, manual work. Honestly, I'll never look at a bowl of rice the same way again.

And stopping to make the photo is what gives you the access to the conversation. Which also makes the photo that much more meaningful to you later. Tommy asked and got permission to make pictures as the ladies were planting.

They continued to talk the whole time he was shooting.

Tommy set up his Godox TT685 speedlight on a stand about 17 feet away from the ladies, low and positioned at far camera left. (Moving it back this far gives him, of course, a more even throw of light across the scene.) He set the flash to full power, using no modifier. This gave him a working aperture of f/8 at ISO 400 on the people in his scene.

At this point, it's just a matter of choosing the shutter speed that gives him the best sky — which the water in the flooded paddy is helpfully reflecting. He went with 1/125th of a second.

Here's a pullback showing the whole, simple setup:

I think the photo at top (and, honestly, the BTS pic too) is gorgeous. And I also love that by posting it to Instagram, Tommy has allowed us to vicariously share the experience.

He even tagged the exact area in Google Maps for us:

How cool is that? And of COURSE Google has already had a street view crew through there (most likely, on the back of a motor scooter). As a result, I just spent the last 20 minutes or so exploring the area as if I was there.
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Thanks to Tommy, to Instagram, to the ID-Strobist group, to Google for all pitching in to give us an armchair trip while we are (at least in the US) stuck at home.

I very much look forward for things to get back to normal, offering the chance to explore places like Java in person.

All photos ©2020 Tommy Soebagjo, used with permission.
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This article was published as an entry in Strobist Lighting Cookbook. New articles and how-to's appear monthly. To receive notifications for new posts, you can follow via email or via Instagram.

Have you tried to buy a new bike lately? Or even a used bike?

The coronavirus pandemic has made them very tough to find. Between homebound people snapping them up and all of the various broken supply chains, most of the bike inventory — other than very pricey specialty bikes — has pretty much vanished.

Which means that if you have a functional bike in your garage that you don't need, it will likely never be worth more than it is right now.

My daughter Emily has an unneeded bike in the garage. It's a Trek 7100, which is decent hybrid. She rode it to middle school. But she's just graduated college and won't be bringing it to her new job.

But right now it should fetch a nice price in the Craigslist Bicycle Hunger Games. Especially if it is photographed and presented well.

So that's exactly what we are going to do today: photograph a bike with a basic two speedlight kit.

Don't you need more light than that? No you do not. In fact, let's make this interesting and photograph it with two of the diminutive Godox TT350 "fun size" flashes just to prove the point.

Here's our massive camera and lighting pack for the day:

I love those little flashes, especially for travel. They are proportioned for my mirrorless Fujis and take up very little space. They are only about half as powerful as a regular speedlight. But as you'll see, that's an easy workaround.

Seriously, these guys are small. They only use two AAs. Which means that we will be lighting this bike with a total of 6 AA batteries — and that includes the two in the transmitter.
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Okay, let's head down to the onsite Garage Mahal studio and light this thing. We'll be shooting at night, to control our ambient light. If we don't have much ambient to overcome, we won't need much power.

First things first, let's scrounge a background. Turns out Ben has a white-laminated 4x8 piece of particle board that will serve nicely. Ben, it should be noted, always has several concurrent projects in progress at the house. This board will be the mold for the epoxy resin base for a soon to be [Palpatine voice] fully operational [/Palpatine voice] CNC router.

But for right now, it's gonna be my background. If not for this, I'd likely move the bike indoors and just shoot against a blank wall.

Let's Grab Some Ambient

We'll start with an A-mode automatic shot of the bike on daylight white balance.

Oh, that looks great. We can just go with that.

Actually, what really looks great about it is the 1/4 second the shutter needed to be open to record it. It's dark in here. So if I set the camera at a 1/250th at somewhere around f/5.6 at a modest ISO, all of that ambient is going to go away. And we'll be lighting the bike only with flash.

Let's try that now:

Yep. Perfect. Now we can add some flash.

Think Big, Muted Speculars

The bike is shiny. We want to capture that surface quality, but also include detail. Plus, the tires are black / matte surfaces. I want some highlight coming back off of those dark surfaces to show texture. So I'll help myself by adding a little Armor All when I clean the bike up, to give the tires a little more luster (and specular efficiency).

My first — and most important — light will be the fill. I want it big, and as close in as possible. So I am going to use a $20 Portable Doorway to get a big light source on the cheap.

I'll also move the camera — and thus, light source as well — in to further help myself. The tube is both shiny and convex on this axis. So the bigger the light source appears, the better.

Moving the camera in close, to get the creamiest light source I can — is an important tweak. So I'll be using a wideangle lens, and coming in just close enough to not have the handlebars visually break the background. So the choice of lens will help my light.

I'm putting the fill light right behind the camera. Big sheet, shooting a flash right through it. Let's look at that first:

Not bad. This is a fatter fill exposure than I might normally use for a portrait. Because I need this light to do a lot of the work for carrying detail throughout all of the gears, rims, tires, chain, etc.

Things I am noticing now:

This looks pretty good. The shiny backdrop (it's not background paper, after all) is giving me a specular reflection of my fill light in the middle. They key light will probably smooth that out when it fully lights the board.

But also, the scruffy concrete floor is distracting. Let's roll out a half-width of white seamless and carry the white all the way to the bottom of the frame.

Next, Add the Key Light for Shape

Okay, the detail light is all set. Now when we give the bike some shape with a soft box from the top, we're there.

Quantity-wise, there's not very much light happening here, either. The flashes are both around 1/4 power. The soft box is much closer to the bike, so that light is definitely a stronger source at that distance.

Here's a setup shot, for scale. (Sorry, it's dark in the garage and I needed pano. So I had to use my phone.)

Note, I am using a C-stand to get my key light out over the bike. But if I didn't have one, I'd just call Ben into the garage to hold the light over the bike on a normal stand.

And this soft box is a little bigger than the one I normally use for people. But a standard 2x3-foot soft box would work just fine as a key light here.

Next, we'll change up the light and shot some detail shots. But first, something that's pretty important if you are selling something on Craigslist or eBay and using nice photos: a shot that shows that this is the actual bike, and not just some pre-existing commercial shot. People tend to gloss over those and assume they are lifted from somewhere.

This ought to do it:

The obscured parts contain my phone number and town. And seriously, if you don't do this the upgraded photography can all be for naught.

Details, Details

Now I'm gonna move the "sheet light" in very close — as close as I can — to spread that specular as far as I can. Then we can pop around the bike and shoot some details like this:

These shots should help the bike stand out against the crappily photographed bikes on Craigslist. It's a nice bike. It's not new, but these shots make it obvious that it is in pretty good shape.

You can see how close the sheet is here, shot when I went in to clean up the garage this morning:

And that's it! Two tiny sub-mini speedlights. Spread that fill light waaaaay out. Add some shape with the key light, and post the ad to the hungry wolves.

One More Thing

As I am getting ready to finish up, I notice Ben's current project (okay, one of several) sitting across the garage. It's a sub-$300 beast of an e-bike, still in progress, running great and awaiting some final cosmetic shrouding of components, etc.

We already have the light set up. Why not swap it in.

If you're into home-brew e-bikes, click to embiggen. Or head over to his Reddit post to learn more about the guts.

Different bike style, different color. But it shows that pretty much any bike would look good in this two-light setup. (Personally, I like the way the built-to-fit triangular battery pack — old laptop batteries — pops back my fill light. But that's just me.)

Thus ends another day in our home-bound COVID spring of 2020. Hope you guys are staying safe — and sane — while we ride this thing out.

Also: if you decide to shoot your bike to convert it to big bucks, show me what you get via Twittter.
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This article was published as an entry in Strobist Lighting Cookbook. New articles and how-to's appear monthly. To receive notifications for new posts, you can follow via email or via Instagram.