Flash diffuser question

[Adam McDowell]

I was curious as to what type of diffuser are you guys using for fill flash outdoors? From what I am reading, there seem to be strong opinions and a good amount of options.

I guess I should be clear in that my main concern is to not have a direct blueish light with a poor shadow when shooting people outdoors where I cannot bounce.

Are any of you using gary fong or sto-fen? I have read strong reviews both ways on these.

[kurt budliger]

I use both occasionally.

[John Bennett]

Same as Kurt.
I have a GF for indoor use, and a stofen for outdoor.

[Adam McDowell]

Have y’all tried amber outdoors?

[Mike Anderson]

I use a lumiquest softbox that is collapsible. It works pretty well. My flash also has a built in bounce card that works well when I don’t have anything.

[benjamin sandoval]

Home made speedlite diffuser. Money spent zero, easily packable, weighs almost nothing. Works great indoors, I have not tried it outdoors yet, so I can’t really say it works outdoors. I would think the home made diffuser would provide similar results outdoors as well.

[Adam McDowell]

I did similar with a rubber band and a white sheet of craft foam. really simple but I need to try it outdoors.

[Ben Cochran]

Keep in mind that a lot of these smaller diffusers are really useless in outside settings. The primary reason that they work so well indoors is due to the fact that they scatter light everywhere and help to create multiple points of bounced light on your subject. In an outdoor setting, without all of the walls, as a bounce source, you will notice that there is less wrap around light on your subject, meaning that the diffused qualities are less apparent. This isn’t because diffused light is less outdoors as much as it demonstrates that most of what we thought was diffused, was actually bounced fill.

As the distance to subject is increased, the quality of truly diffused light is diminished. At a point, the light is no longer diffused but this variable depends upon the size of the diffused light source. The larger the source of diffused light, the further the diffused quality of light will travel, the smaller the size is the opposite. Another little trick of the trade is to use the feathered edge of the light, when shooting outdoors, to help soften the light landing on the subject.

So, what I am getting at is, if you are using light as a fill light outdoors, you may not need to diffuse the artificial light at all. An alternative may be a reflector, which can serve as an excellent source for fill light.

As far as matching the Kelvin, you can use gels to do that. Keep in mind that you will loose some light but that is the better method for matching the Kelvin of the primary light source.

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