We photographed Erica's senior portraits at Val Vista Lakes in Gilbert Arizona. She dances, and we wanted to evoke the feeling of stage lighting with the lights that we used. We shot until well after sunset, but came back with some spectacular images.

Jerry and Sarah (the photographers at FergusonPhotography.com) teamed up again on this shoot for some engagement photos. Sarah scouted an excellent location in a wheat field near Williams Field Airport. Jerry and Sarah switched off shooting and lighting, holding a strobe in an umbrella above Chase and Kaela and using the awesome Arizona sunset as our backdrop.

Las Sendas in Northeast Mesa is a great place for family photos, and since Sarah hasn't had a family picture in a while, and I wanted to try out some new lighting, we decided to do a family portrait session up there.

We arrived close to sunset and started to set up. Since we'd arrived a bit later than we'd hoped, I'd say that the ambient light was around 1/30 of a second at f4 - challenging, particularly if I wanted to maintain the silky smoothness that ISO 100 produces on Canon's excellent CMOS sensors.

I set up a white shoot-through umbrella camera-left at 8:00, with the sun camera-right at about 2:00. I balanced the flash - a Vivitar 285 - and ended up with it at 1/16 power.

The hardest part was corralling the kids. They just want to play in the grass and the fountain, and I can't blame them. There aren't many places in the metro Phoenix area that offer grass, fountains, desert, and cool stone arches. It's a virtual playground for a photographer and for kids.