A few years ago I spent some time in Singapore teaching digital photography to a group of newspaper photographers. On my final night there, they took me out to a dinner of "spare parts." Trust me, you don't want to know what it was. If you've been doing photography for very long, you've probably collected various spare parts over the years, and sometime they come in handy for building new tools.

I recently received a call asking if I could do photos of a couple's daughter and her horse. They'd just moved into a new home, and wanted a large portrait to hang in the living room. We scheduled the shoot for early evening, when the light would be nice. The dad also had a spot picked out near the stables that he thought would work well (and it did).

Knowing I'd want to shoot her either sidelit or backlit by the sun, I also knew I'd need to add some light to her face. Best way of doing that would be to bring along a strobe, and remotely fire it from a stand set up to the side. Triggering the strobe wouldn't be a problem - I could use PocketWizards, a long cable or Nikon's SU-800 in Commander mode. What concerned me was whether I'd get enough power out of the portable strobes. The light would need to carry some distance to reach her and the horse, and I wanted to have fast recycle times so I could shoot quickly.

I knew I could achieve both of those by using more than one strobe. I could set up two stands, but thought it would be a little easier if I could attach both lights to one stand. Having been in photography for 35 years, I've collected a lot of junk, and can never make myself throw any of it away. Digging through the boxes, I found a bracket designed to mount two cameras (or two of anything with 1/4-20 sockets). A bit more digging and I pulled out two small ballheads, and then found a couple of flash shoes that would screw onto the ballheads. With it all put together, I could easily mount two portable strobes atop a light stand.

On location, everything worked great. The horse was well behaved (as well as a horse can be), the girl was easy to work with, and I only had to lie down in manure once during the shoot. Now comes the fun part. Picking out one that everyone likes, doing some magic in editing (I'm thinking selective focus and black-and-white conversion, bringing color back to her and the horse) and making a 24" by 36" print. And best of all, some of my old "junk" now has a new life.