Lighting Equipment

This weekend I got two stands and umbrellas from Amazon.com. Great purchase, we did our first newborn shoot this weekend with them and it was awesome and they worked so well. The far umbrella has a ringlight that I was borrowing from the UW, I have a flash coming soon, that should light up the whole umbrella better, I will post pictures taken with the set up in the coming days.

My main learning source was http://strobist.blogspot.com. They have a great website with all kinds of tips and ideas to get started with strobe lighting.  
The amazon.com links in this post are to the equipment I bought.  It's not the best stuff, but it is pretty sweet and does an awesome job, I've been very impressed so far with it.  We also took some self portraits of ourselves last night, just messing around, I will try to get those photos up this week, so you can see some examples of our work.  So we have 2 of the umbrella kits and 2 of the wireless triggers for the flashes.  It works, it simply just works, it is so great, and easy to set up.  I just need to get a bag to transport it.   If you buy through these links, Amazon gives us a kickback, so that would be great, but obviously you don't have to.  We also purchased a new flash from mpex, the flash comes highly recommended and I will have a separate post on that after we get it, it has adjustable flash power and as much power as Canon's 580 speedlite (which is like $500), but this one was much cheaper.  Check it out here.  http://www.mpex.com/browse.cfm/4,14648.html

Have a great day.