My wife thinks I spend too much time in the basement office. Maybe she's right, Yesterday I found myself playing with my daughter's old Barbie collection.

In my defense, I'd argue I have a good reason. I'm creating some new programs to teach this fall, and one of the sections is all about lighting. And I need some new illustrations. And there's no one here to model for me. So...

It's actually not a bad idea. One of the challenges of learning to use lights (strobes in this case) is having a model who's willing to be patient and not move. After all, if you want to see what happens when you move lights and change power and ratios, then you need your subject to stay in the same position. That's hard for a person to do, but not a doll.

When I got started working with lights back in the eighties, my boss made me use hot lights. It was a lot of fun - not! I can't tell you how many fuses and circuits I blew in people's homes, and it wasn't uncommon for the subject to be sweating. Those lights were hot! But there was a good reason for making me do that. Using strobes it's hard to know where the light's going. In film days you had to know that intuitively or shoot Polaroids. So learning to light with hot lights - a constant light source - meant I learned how to position lights for the angle and effect I wanted. Once I understood that, I could move to strobes. And I lived and died by my trusty Minolta Flashmeter IV (to check flash exposure).

With digital, this process is much simpler. You can shoot some tests, look at what's happening on the LCD, check exposure with the Histogram and Highlight readouts and then adjust. Still, you need a model to work with. And when live ones aren't available, I recommend Barbies.