Gary Fong LightsphereThis great product is always in my bag when I need to shoot a portrait, but don't have the time or space to set up a multiple strobe system with Pocket Wizards.

Looking like a plastic Tupperware™ bowl sitting atop your strobe, this innovative device will greatly improve your portraits.

When you shoot with direct flash the results are usually harsh as you're throwing all that light forward. You tend to wash out your subject and create a nasty drop shadow behind them. That's not ideal. It's pretty awful actually.

By using a light modifier like the Lightsphere ($39.95), you change what's happening to the output of your flash. In the photo you'll see that you point your strobe upward rather than forward. In doing so, when your strobe fires you're sending the light in all directions. While you're throwing a lot of it upward to bounce off a ceiling (ideally), the light is going to be sent all around the room. By doing that you're popping some light in places it wasn't going otherwise. This will soften the lighting greatly, fill in the shadows and produce a vastly more pleasing photo.

The downside to the Lightsphere is that it takes up a lot of space in your bag and at some point you could lose the inverted dome. This is a minor gripe though. The results you'll get with the Lightsphere is worth having to find room for it in your bag.

I make sure to bring the Lightsphere with me to a shoot unless I'm in a situation where it'll get in the way and I need to be more mobile. In that case I rely on my Sto-Fen OmniBounce ($16.95). That product forms to the end of your strobe and doesn't add much bulk at all so you'll have no problem moving through a crowd. The Lightsphere isn't ideal in that regard.

Both the Lightsphere and the OmniBounce are available in various sizes to accommodate most strobes out there.