Ever since Mark Wallace picked my name out of a hat to win a pair of PocketWizard Mini TT1/Flex TT5 units, I have been a fan of his.

Just kidding.

I always enjoy the way Mark teaches photography, especially lighting. His technical acumen about big studio lights or little on or off-camera speedlights is phenomenal.

While his YouTube channel is full of great videos explaining how he uses light, from May 18 through the 20th, he is going to be doing a bit of a brain dump through CreativeLive. So, sitting in the comfort of your home, you can tune in online to view Mark talk about Speedlights for FREE. On those days alone, it is a live event.

I have watched and bought several CreativeLIVE courses and they are all very well produced. Also, knowing Mark, I expect his attention to detail and his dedication to teaching to come through. What's truly awesome about CreativeLIVE is, as it is happening, you can ask the instructor questions or comment on what you are learning. You do need a Twitter account and the right hashtag to do so. If you enroll now for Mark's class, I am sure you will be emailed some instructions on what to do.

If you can't make the online event or the nightly re-broadcasting of the show, then you can buy the download for $99 – a small investment for your business or hobby. If you know the in's and out's of using your speedlights this course may not be a good fit for you. But if you are like me who wants to know all the functions, say, a Nikon SB900 provides, then I would recommend tuning in (hey, it's FREE) on May 18th, 19th and 20th.

If you miss Mark's CreativeLIVE presentations, you can hopefully catch him during one of his photography workshops this year. He is going to start in his hometown of Phoenix, then goes to Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Miami and Houston. Other cities may be added to the list. So, keep an eye out for that on his workshop site. Mark is offering 4 distinct workshops at each stop. Check them out! I hope to go to the ones in New York, unless of course, he decides to bring the workshop to Boston, or better yet, to Hartford, Connecticut.

I was one of those that scoffed at the idea of learning old-school lighting and posing. But guess what? I was wrong. Learning the fundamentals is so crucial to our success that when the Monte Zucker Lighting and Education bundle was being offered through PhotoDough.com, I had to jump in and get it.

Who was Monte Zucker? He was a master as lighting and posing. He was a teacher. At one of the first WPPI's I attended, I recall a room full of nearly a 1000 people sitting there watching this man teach his techniques. The minute the seminar ended, the crowd surged on towards the stage to badger him with more questions. I had absolutely no chance of getting close to him. I felt like I was at a rock concert. People like Bambi Cantrell still talk about him and what he taught her.

“Based on classical tradition, Monte’s portraiture has never strayed far from his original intent – to capture a moment in people’s lives and memorialize it for posterity.”

After battling cancer, Monte Zucker passed away in 2007. I know it was a huge blow to the industry he cared so much about.

Here is what Bay Area photographer Michael Corsentino says about Monte Zucker:

“Sad that some people don't know but at least they're asking. He was a great person and a passionate educator, definitely missed.”

Thankfully, his teaching lives on.

You can learn more about Monte Zucker's products here. But if you are quick, you can grab a good chunk of what the store offers and save $131 now through PhotoDough.com.

For $49 you receive a downloadable set of 4 CD-ROMS, including 6 slideshows with over 500 photographic examples with text descriptions. Also included are PDFs that you can tote around on your iPad and refer to often. As I said, I bought this bundle and I am looking forward to getting back to basics. Frankly, there are too many “teachers” out in the world now who are just winging it. If you want to learn from the best, this is your chance.

Get to know Monte Zucker and learn from him at your own pace. The PhotoDough.com deal is only on for a limited time.

Oh, one more thing – it's tempting to learn from a master and just copy what she or he says. That would defeat the purpose of photography for me. I intend to learn from Monte Zucker, but plan on adapting it to the way I work with my clients. Making that experience unique is key to everyone's success. Good luck!

Images are created in fractions of a second and our memories are often too poor to remember how we set up a particular shot. Indeed there is a part of us that probably feels confident in achieving the same look and concept, if only we knew where and how the off-camera flashes were placed, how they were modified or what our settings on the camera were. Well, a couple of weeks ago I connected with Janis Lanka, who founded Strobox.

Strobox is a place for all types of photographers to share how they set up that amazing photo! The easiest way to learn is to look at photos and their lighting diagrams so you can see for yourself how they were created.

Here is a, um, snapshot of the questions I peppered Janis with during our conversation. If you have other questions for him, please post them in the comments section below.

1) It's great that in such a short span of time, you have been able to create a community of photographers interested in presenting their work and getting it critiqued. How do you, however, qualify the images? Is it a free for all – anyone can post to the site regardless of quality?

While currently there are few basic rules that I screen each photo for, we are continuously adding measures that help us filter through spam or unqualified photos. It's important to note that Strobox is about a community that raises everyone’s awareness about photography lighting, and as a such, the quality control should be a part of community effort. The ultimate goal is that work displayed is a result of a joint effort from our community rather than just from one or two individuals who happen to have access to MySQL db!

2) Tell us a little bit about yourself – are you a professional photographer? Why or rather how did you see the need to create a website like Strobox for photographers?

Just like most who reads this, photography has been a hobby of mine taught to me by my dad with a Zenit camera. Fast forward almost two decades, my learning curve needed some improvement and I purchased a book about portrait photography which explained how each photo was made by giving technical information as well as sketches of lighting diagrams. That is when I asked the question on why such a thing is not available online. The idea was born and it took another 2 years to make it happen. An iPhone app, a community site, and a book later I still see it as a fun experiment.

Currently my day job consists of being a Strategy Consultant at digital agency “Blast Radius” and by evening I'm trying to coordinate a group effort to make Strobox happen – someone from Canada contributes their design skills, from Slovakia their CSS skills, from Lithuania their programming skills, and from England their editor skills, etc. The Strobox core team members are volunteers and not necessarily professional photographers. We continuously need more help (PHP anyone?) so if you want to join us, let me know!

3) I received Strobox 2010, your first book which is more of a compilation of some of the best work your site has seen in 2010. Books aren't typically huge money makers for their authors. So why take that risk?

No, making a book has not been our revenue strategy. First and foremost it's a celebration of our community and their efforts to help each other raise awareness about photography lighting. While this was yet another one of those enthusiastic experiments which resulted in hundreds of hours spent trying to figure out different legal and logistical things in the book-publishing world, it was totally worth it! Not financially, but the emotional reward is there when you hold that book in your hands for the first time. This book seeks to showcase our community’s achievements during 2010, acknowledge our top contributors, and most importantly, attempting to help us financially sustain our online community. On top of that, we’re also sharing 40% of the book’s profit with the top ten photographers who joined us for this initiative. This has been our first attempt at publishing, and we hope that we'll be able to do this every year and show our appreciation to our community this way.

4) Technique and using tools is one thing. Being able to craft images by collaborating with your subjects is another story. Do you think your site will ever shift the focus every so slightly to discuss that collaboration? That almost intrigues me more than what kind of a light modifier was used in the process of creating an image. Am I in the minority on this?

You are probably in the right minority by asking this excellent question! I would say that story and emotional response it creates is what makes a photo stand out from the others. Lighting technique is merely a tool to help you with that goal. I love listening to other photographers share their techniques and stories of collaboration – those things can't be methodologically systematized as lighting diagrams can. So, in a rather simple way the Strobox community is trying to do one of those “un-sexy” things and geek-out about photography lighting to help each other get the basics right so that sites like yours could take them to the next level.

5) I suspect with sites like 500px.com and Sylights.com, competition keeps you in check. What would you say Strobox does differently and better than those other sites?

Both of your mentioned sites do an amazing job and each of them excel at different things. Without getting in too many details, focus of Strobox should be changing a bit so stay tuned! Additionally, because this is mostly a volunteer experiment that is not based on generating revenue or trying to entice customers, I would rather ask a question of what keeps us doing this. It's our community members who write us and thank us for a useful iPhone app, it’s our Facebook fans who encourage us and like to hear what we’re doing, and it’s our community members who help us with moderation.This started as an attempt to get educated about photography lighting by looking at other examples. But it has turned into a platform for learning. When you learn something, we’ve done well.

Thank you for help us not just create lighting diagrams but also curate them and share them with others. We'll be sure to follow you on Twitter to hear more of your experiments and new features on Strobox.

This guest post is by Olivier Lance, who with Pierre-Jean Quilleré launched Sylights in 2009, a wonderful web and mobile application for photographers that helps them document their lighting setups. Olivier, a full time IT engineer from Paris, France, develops MacOS X software for a living. He's also a passionate photographer. Please follow Olivier on Twitter.

Every now and then, when you post a photo to your blog or on a sharing platform, you get the common question: “how did you light it?”

That's a tricky one! How do you go explaining to somebody a full setup of light modifiers, gobos, flash settings, angles, etc.?

The short answer is: lighting diagrams.

Not everyone needs a lighting diagram to understand the lights behind a photography; experienced photographers can usually tell by looking at the shadows’ softness or shapes or at the catch light.

However, I'm not one of them. At least, not yet! So what do lighting diagrams have that can help me? Let's state the obvious first: lighting diagrams show the gear used to light a scene and how many lights were used. They show where the lights were set and how they were directed, relative to the subject.

“Relativity” is an important notion here. I think it's the key when working with lights. What I really see when I look at a lighting diagram is not “where” the main light is, but “how far” it is from the subject. And “how farther” (or closer, larger, etc.) the fill light has to be to do its job just as I see it in the resulting photo.

The same principle applies to flash power. This is a second set of information that's usually provided on or along with lighting diagrams. To correctly reproduce lighting, one has to know how powerful each light was. But it's really “the relationship between the different light levels that is important”, David Hobby tells us in his article Strobe/Ambient balance: A Shorthand Way of Thinking.

See, we're not used to describing amounts of light in an absolute manner. You'd rather say “this room is dark” – referring to what we usually consider a properly lit room – than “wow, it's barely 150 lux in here!”. Both are indicating a light level, but the former is relative whereas the latter is absolute. So a good lighting diagram could just use the main light as a reference and then say “this light is +1/3 of a stop, this other one -1 stop”.

That's why a lighting diagram is such a wonderful document to any photograph. No matter the kind of flash I use and no matter how powerful they are. By using that basic information – relative distances, angles, relative light levels – I can reproduce the lighting over and over again.

That's the main reason I see why photographers should use lighting diagrams: memory. Some photos are easy enough to remember; a lighting diagram will ensure the others are as easily reproducible. Besides the memory perspective, a document as complete as a lighting diagram is also a great way to share your knowledge … but more on that in a minute.

Another very simple reason is that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” If you’re working with one or several assistants, you’d rather be drawing what you have in mind than explaining it at great length several times! This leads me to the second main reason I think photographers should get used to lighting diagrams: teaching. There are so many people learning artificial lighting nowadays: amateur photographers, photography students and pros as well, who want to improve their technique.? To any of them, lighting diagrams are an incredible educational tool! By putting together a photo and its diagram, one can understand the role and effects of each light in a setup. So if you document your photos by using lighting diagrams, you can actually teach other photographers your lighting techniques and help them figure out very easily how you lit your shoots. Diagrams are also a perfect way to keep track of the setups that worked while testing and learning.

Finally, lighting diagrams allow any photographer to prepare a shoot beforehand. Just as I’m using a draft paper to prepare this post, a lighting diagram can easily be drawn to throw ideas, get the ball rolling and have some setups ready before a session. This is the third advantage of lighting diagrams: planning. You can of course use any other technique to prepare a shoot, but the completeness of a lighting diagram and its close representation of a real setup makes it a good choice to start with, before you can actually try your setups and make arrangements.

So, why should you use lighting diagrams as a photographer? Because it’s a great way to prepare your sessions, to document your photos afterwards and to keep track of your lighting setups as well as to share them with others and to teach beginners your techniques.

All those reasons pushed me to create Sylights, a service to photographers I launched a year ago with my friend Pierre-Jean Quilleré. Our idea is to make lighting diagrams easy to use and to base a complete sharing platform on them. Sylights’ goal is to accompany every photographers on their learning path and to store their lighting diagrams for them. We already offer a large range of tools for that purpose: an online diagram editor with a lighting diagram gallery accessible to anyone, an iPhone and an iPad app for when you’re on the go. Many features revolve around those three apps.

We’re still evolving and will gladly accept all your feedback to help us answer those three needs: memory, teaching and planning.

We’d also like to know: how do you use lighting diagrams, and why?

Yesterday, Tony Urban talked about off-camera lighting on location. If you are photographing early in the morning or later in the day, it's much easier to use your smaller Speedlites for the kind of results Tony produces for his clients.

But when you aren't so lucky about picking the time of day and your stuck having to fight that big fiery ball in the sky called the Sun, you are going to need something more powerful, like a studio strobe. Check out how Justin Van Leeuwen does it with an Elinchrom Quadra System.

I recently bought a few used Elinchrom monoblocs for the expressed purpose of using them outside, in the sun and to over power it. That's all well and good, but I was left wondering about how I would power it in the field.

Well, I initially bought the Paul C. Buff Vagabond II, now being discontinued. It is one very heavy option and I tell you I didn't use it much at all because it was such a pain to lug around. Photographer Blair Phillips has come up with an interesting way to carry it around, so if you have a Vagabond II, you should check the LR-02 Light Rover.

I sold my Vagabond II unit and for some time I did not have another option. But the folks at Paul C. Buff came out with the much lighter Vagabond Mini. The wait to get one of those units, when I ordered them, was 2 to 3 weeks. That may not be the case anymore. At $240, it was a no brainer. Plus, Rob Galbraith's review of the Vagabond Mini convinced me that this was the unit to buy for what I wanted to do. Knowing its capabilities, I am not one to expect a faster recycle time than 3 or 3 1/2 seconds at full pop. So, I just shoot accordingly.

But there are clearly other options out there. Cris Mitchell of ProPhotoResource suggested that I look at Innovatronix Explorer XT as an alternative to the Vagabond II. It too is solidly built and has rave reviews from its legions of fans.

Today, I received an email about Tronix Explorer Mini. And here, according to the company, are the top reasons for buying it. Check out the video below that shows you how quickly the unit recycles. While it calls itself a “mini” it is only so relative to its big brother the Tronix Explorer XT3 (coming soon).

I wonder if Rob Galbraith will get his hands on this unit so that he could compare it with the Vagabond Mini. I sure hope so! If you consider yourself handy with tools and gadgets and like to put things together, take a look at this Instructables tutorial to create a portable power box for photographers.

Which option would go for and why? Tell us in the comments. If you found this post useful, please share it with your tribe using the social media icons you see directly below this post. Thank you!