As processing power increases, ray tracing becomes increasingly popular because of its clean mechanisms for shadowing and specular reflection. The basic algorithm has remained largely unchanged since it was introduced by Whitted [4]. One of ray tracings' chief limitations is the hard edges it computes for shadows. Soft edged shadows are preferred to hard shadows independent of aesthetics because soft shadows aid in accurate spatial perception [3]. Ray tracing methods that produce accurate soft shadows such as ray tracing with cones [1] or probabilistic ray tracing [2] stress accurate soft shadows, so they dramatically increase computation time relative to hard shadow computation. In this paper we introduce an inexpensive algorithm for soft shadows that can be plugged into a conventional ray tracer. The algorithm sacrifices accuracy to attain speed, but the important qualitative features of soft shadows are preserved, and only one shadow sample is needed per pixel.