Flash Diffusers

Flash Diffusers
Photo by Alexander Dummer / Unsplash

Finally, the flash bounces I ordered arrived, and I got some play time with them. The gear we will be talking about is as follows:

  1. Sony A7III with 55mm f1.8 in Aperture mode
  2. Godox TT685s flash in TTL mode
  3. Camera Flash Bounce Diffuser
  4. FocusFoto Universal Flash Speedlite Bounce Diffuser
  5. Smiling Buddha as a test subject
Gear used for testing

The first photo will be without flash with natural sunlight coming from the background. Luckily, the window is facing south, similar to the venue tomorrow. The day is overcast so the light is not as hard but intense enough for the shutter speed to auto-set at 1/5000. You get a real good silhouette of the test subject but cannot distinguish any feature of the test subject—the challenge. The photo is unedited and exported at jpeg.

No flash, no edits
Lightrooms auto edits. The features are not clear

I auto-adjusted the photo using Lightroom. It is an improvement, but there isn't enough room to bring out the features, as the background will blow with any more editing.

Next, we use flash in TTL mode with aperture priority. One thing I noticed is that Sony is smart enough to detect the flash and give a preview. I am going to start with directly facing the flash on the subject and tilting it slightly upwards with each shot and showing the differences. Please ignore the focus as I tried to get the hands in the focus but it shouldn't matter a lot. As you can see now, the features are more visible as you are opposing the background light with flash. It gets better with the flash being bounced off the ceiling.  

Next, I use the flash bounce on the Godox and repeat the 3 angles by directly exposing the subject and then bouncing the light off the ceiling at two angles. There is some softening of the flash light but the subject has a bit of an overexposed face.

With the Flash bounce setup

Next, I used FocusFoto's softbox contraption without the front diffuser. Due to the setup, I don't have to change the angle of the flash flight, but I tried tweaking the exposure as the camera is not aware of the bounce surface. I stepped down one stop at a time and I got better results than just using the gear before.

The FocusFoto flash bounce without the front diffuser

Next, I put on the diffuser covering and got a better result with three different stops manually adjusted.

FocusFoto with front diffuser

Finally, I put together both the gear and tried out and stopped down twice. I like the last photo with two accessories and manually stopping down twice. This is going to be my setup for the event. Now it is time to get AAs from Costco :)

With both flash bounce gear together

I got a good fill with both the bounces together. For some reason, the full-power TTL was a bit brighter than earlier. I will have to step it one stop down.