For Joey Terrill, being a photographer is more than just a rewarding occupation; it is a life-long passion that has gripped him since he was 11 years old. His first job was as a photographer for the LA Times. But he realized quite early on that this kind of work was not going to meet his creative needs, and so for the last 17 years he has been working for himself. Today he specializes in the surprisingly diverse areas of architectural photography, and portraiture. Terrill's portrait work includes corporate portraits, although he is best known for his photographs that illustrate many feature stories in Sports Illustrated magazine. He is also a regular faculty member at the Rich Carlson workshops for sports photographers.

Photography for Terrill is an education that someone else pays for. "Every day I get to go to a different location to shoot a different subject, and while I'm doing my two or three or four hours of lighting set ups, I'm getting an education about what they do. What I really enjoy is going out and meeting people and seeing what they do and then coming home with a little souvenir, which is my picture."

Although he had a studio for a while, Terrill prefers the challenges of being out on location for the majority of his work. He enjoys taking the partially painted canvas of his location, and finishing it in his own style, for his images. On looking back over his work, he realizes that his architectural and portrait work are crossing over and influencing each other. In particular, he has noticed a tendency to use a lot of space in his portraits, often composing an architectural shot and then putting a portrait in the middle of it.

Terrill has been using Lighttools® Soft Egg Crates® in his work for the last couple of years. "When I first saw one on the front of a 12ft x 12ft silk on the Matthews stand at Showbiz Expo, I nearly fell over, because I could see how this idea would be useful to me in my work. I find myself in situations where the Soft Egg Crates® are absolutely indispensable, particularly when I'm in a very tight environment and I want to control the light and keep it off the background. As probably 98% of my work is done on location, what really makes them great for me is that they fold up and travel well.

Before discovering Soft Egg Crates®, Terrill had been experimenting with a much less sophisticated version of this form of light control. "I had made my own grids, from fluorescent fixture grids, spray-painted black, and wired on to the front of my soft boxes. While they worked OK, they didn't travel too well, and the softboxes were far less stable. The other problem is you can't get different grid sizes to vary your control."

Terrill finds that he often uses his Soft Egg Crates® to solve specific problems. "I find them to be indispensable. In some ways they're more value to me than the softboxes themselves. I find that I need them about 80% of the time. To be honest, I could get away without them in some situations, but it just makes my job a heck of a lot easier to have them on, so I tend to use them most of the time. Besides, they go on so quickly. It isn't as though fitting them is a difficult process. It takes under a minute to put one on, and it's certainly worth the effort."

This becomes even more important in sensitive situations, where Terrill works without an assistant. "I recently did a project in a very small space, with an intimate situation where I felt it would be better not to have an assistant. I had two light set-ups going in the same 10ft x 10ft (3m x 3m) space, and even with two very large light boxes I had no problems maintaining absolute control of the light. One of the things I really like about the Soft Egg Crate® is that it lets you totally defy the laws of light physics."

Terrill currently uses (Soft) Egg Crates® on his Wafer 140 (54" x 39" or 1350 x 1000mm) and Wafer 75 ( 30" x 21" or 750 x 550mm) softboxes. He would also like a Soft Egg Crate® for his Wafer 200, (75" x 54" or 1900 x 1350mm) and has been discussing the possibility of having one custom fabricated by Lighttools®. He is disappointed that softboxes manufacturers, such as Plume and Chimera, don't make their customers sufficiently aware of the availability and capabilities of the Soft Egg Crates® for their equipment. "I think that perhaps they just see the grids as something that simply controls the spill of light, without realizing all of the other applications for them."

"When I have been teaching at seminars, I have had the comment, quite correctly, that Soft Egg Crates® are expensive, sometimes even more expensive than the softboxes that they're fitted on. However, I can say with utmost confidence that the time I will save using the grid will more than cover the cost, in the first several uses. A perfect example of this is when you're shooting an architectural shot inside a very small room and you have to keep the light up very high, but you can't have any spill light on the ceiling. Instead of the time that you would take to keep the light from spilling on the ceiling, using flags, another stand, an arm and all of that paraphernalia, you can just throw a grid on the softbox and go to town with the shot. You save five to ten minutes on every shot, and you don't have to drag all that extra gear with you in the first place."