I'm not sure how any other photographers started off, but I know how I started off.

At first, I just wanted to be able to take some decent pictures of my kids. That was 11 years ago.

With M about 5 months prego in 2002, I really only had my first camera for a month or so.
I needed to figure out how to make this thing work when it was important. By the time Ian was
almost here, I had taken some decent pictures, some still life shots, a few flowers, nothing
special. But there was something inside me that has always said...

"What if?"

In the earliest days, it was, "What if I set the aperture here, the shutter speed there, and the
ISO to this?" I had basically taught myself the photographic triangle and what a stop of light was,
without really knowing anything, other than, "if I go 3 clicks in this direction with the shutter,
and 3 clicks with the aperture in that direction, or bump the iso up 1 number, it's still a
properly exposed photo, but something was different. At the time I was only concerned with
sharpness, but the importance of those 3 settings started to take on more meaning as days went by.

That early camera (Sony S85) didn't have a hot shoe, but it had manual controls, so I played
with exposures, and a little bounce flash for a year, before I upgraded to one that I could
fire a flash remotely with (Sony 717).

Throw in a manual control Sunpak 383 with 5 power levels and now it's game on. There were so
many variables to contend with. It was nuts. I must have shot 40,000 photos that second year,
mostly of the same 10 objects, and occasionally getting a shot of Ian putting more food
ON his face than IN his mouth.

Jump forward 9 more years, and I'm still saying "What if?".

Today I asked myself if I can still get a decently exposed shot using 2 flat bounce surfaces and
one flash. The flash is image right and is bounced off my 9" square white balance target's
silver side, and image left is a 36" silver reflector.

I kept saying, what if I move the light further away? What if I change the distance between
the reflectors? What if my kid gets pissed off and leaves before I get this shot? Did it
turn out perfect. Meh...it's a good shot of my kid, but not my best work. But I at least know
that what I tried is POSSIBLE, but not ideal. Tomorrow maybe I'll try it with 3 flat bounce
surfaces and a new model, since this one started whining too much.

I've made some decent shots with flash. I enjoy the power it provides. Would I prefer to go
with hot lights or some other sort of constant artificial light source for my studio style shots?
Hell yea. Flash takes forever to get right some times. Hot lights are what-you-see-is-what-you-get.
But in order to get that level of power in hot lights, costs boo-koo-bucks. Something I ain't
got a lot of right now. But maybe one day.