Michael Grecco is a portrait photographer whose work ranges from editorial and advertising work to magazines including GQ, Playboy, Time and Entertainment Weekly, and publicity portraits for Fox, UPN and Warner. He is fond of the look of dramatic lighting but likes the modeling qualities of soft light. In his quest for controlled soft light he tried a variety techniques. "I adapted an old Mole Richardson studio 2K fresnel to a strobehead," he recalls. "That enabled me to have fairly soft light that was definitely directional and cut-able." He feels that the use of Soft Egg Crates® on softlights meets his need for both soft light and control. "I've found them invaluable for the Hollywood stuff I do, where I still want to have a dramatic look to the light but it's so important with the personalities I'm shooting that it's soft and flattering."

"I used to work with a lot of hard light." says Grecco, "With the Soft Egg Crate® grids I am able to mix in softer light in situations where I couldn't normally have used it because it was spilling out all over the place. For so many years, softboxes were pretty much out of the question for lighting dramatically because they were so uncontrollable. Even with lots of flags they were still all over the place."

Although he is a strong advocate of soft lighting Grecco still uses every tool available: "There are times when a three degree grid on a strobehead is still the most dramatic thing that I can use, if it's appropriate. Say for example when I'm photographing a businessman, where the shot is not centered so much around beauty, it's more important to have drama."

One set-up that Grecco frequently uses is a narrow Soft Egg Crate® grid on an extra-small softbox lighting just the face, combined with a large softbox either immediately underneath or off to the side of the lens as a fill. "The larger softbox could be either gridded or ungridded. If it's a white background I don't grid it, but if I'm keeping the mood to the room, then I'll grid the large softbox as well."

He also uses softboxes with grids when trying to capture the feeling of his subject's surroundings: "They're great when you're photographing someone in their environment and you don't want the light everywhere in the room. Once you start gridding the softboxes you can achieve that."

"One of my favorite tricks is taking a small gridded softbox, maybe two feet by three feet, and using that as a single light source. If it's spotting up too much and I'm not getting enough light on the rest of the body, I'll take a couple of clothes-pins and peel away the grid from the bottom third or quarter of the box and let that spill out all over the place as my fill. You're getting two different light sources from the one light."

Grecco's work takes him all over the world, so much so that he doesn't have his own studio. "We are used to taking it all with us wherever we go, softboxes and everything. That's what's so great about the Soft Egg Crates® they fold up and they ship right in the bag with the softboxes because we use grids on them pretty much all of the time. Its helped me with the amount of equipment I carry, the set-up time and above all the quality of the pictures."