In fact there are only two ways you can soften the light of an on camera strobe. All the rest are pretend. e.g. it must work everybody says so, but you can't tell it from the pictures.
1. Is to cause an appreciable amount of the light to bounce around the room. Diffusers like the sto-fen, and Styrofoam cups stuck over the flash head work this way. They cause a huge lost of guide number. But if the room is smallish and the walls and ceiling light colored they work pretty well. 2. Is to make the light source appreciably larger. Umbrellas, soft-boxes, and reflector cards work this way. The also cause a lost of guide number but not as much as the former method. But to be effective at anything other than close distances they have to be rather large. I used an 8x10 inch bounce card for the forsale pics that I had up on my web site at about one foot from the lenses. At ten feet it would be only slightly better than the bare flash. A 3x4 foot soft-box would be rather effective at that distance. Umbrellas fall somewhere between the two. The little reflectors and soft boxes that are sold to amateurs are very effective at making money for the dealers, they do little for your photography. Sometimes you see press photographers with a small bounce card taped to their flash. One such photographer I talked to said he used it so the celebs would know he had taken their picture with out actually affecting the lighting much. Ciao, Graywolf http://pages.prodigy.net/graywolfphoto ---------------------------------------------------------------- - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
