Gary Fong Light Sphere Diffuser
Avoid The Harshness Direct Flash Gives Portraits With A Diffuser.
Gary Fong's universal Lightsphere flash diffuser gives portraits a soft professional look without the need for a ton of gear or an army of assistants.
The Lightsphere is an accessory flash diffuser for flash units that normally mount on the digital camera’s hot shoe. This aftermarket item from Gary Fong relies on pointing the head of the flash straight up. When the flash fires the Lightsphere fills with light and radiates a bright white glow in nearly all directions.
Reducing Harsh Shadows
Direct strong light produces harsh well-defined shadows, tending to accentuate slight skin imperfections. The common technique to reduce this harshness is pointing the head of the flashgun at nearby wall or ceiling, using this as a reflector to produce diffuse even light on the subject.
Problems With Bounce Flash
There are a couple of major shortcomings in this approach. Firstly, the color of the wall or ceiling affects the color of the reflected light. White is a common ceiling color, but walls are often other colors and these produce a colorcast in the image. In situations without adjacent walls or the location has high or dark ceilings, then bounce flash is ineffective.
Omni Directional Light Reduces Harsh Shadows
One unwanted characteristic of bounce flash diffusion is it is still one directional. This can result in pronounced eye socket shadows. The generation of omni directional light is the advantage of the Gary Fong Lightsphere, resulting in light from many directions lighting the subject. As light from each direction produces its own shadow on the subject, now the tendency is for the edges of shadows to be large and ill defined, with a softer transition to the darker area.
The Lightsphere DVD
Gary Fong Lightspheres come with an excellent DVD with Gary Fong and others demonstrating a range of flash techniques. This is almost a flash tutorial by itself.
The Domes
The Lightsphere features a removable inverted dome top to help adjust the light output for different situations. Gary Fong recommends using Lightsphere in most situations without a dome. The open top allows for reflected light off the ceiling to mix with the diffused direct light from the sides of the Lightsphere. Where there are high ceilings, or bouncing some of the light is impracticable, adding a dome will direct more light horizontally onto the subject.
Outdoors, when using fill flash, rotating the flash head so the dome points at the subject, giving a soft even light, removing shadows without harsh shiny reflections from subject’s faces.
Fitting Onto The Flash Gun
Gary Fong has designed the Lightsphere to fit a wide range of flashguns. Unfortunately the regular suite101 Photography flashgun is a larger than normal Metz 45 handle unit, not one of the smaller hot shoe units. The Metz 45 is not on the list at garyfong.com of units compatible with Lightsphere units, so it was no surprise when it would not fit. The basic effectiveness of the design allowed a few small cuts and trims to make the unit mount on the larger flash head. If you own one of the units on the large list of compatible units, fitting should be a breeze.
First Shoot
A client required pictures of their wedding expo display in a venue with high black ceilings, making any form of simple bounce flash diffusion impossible. This provided the impetuous to work out the initial mounting problems, as direct flash is too harsh and produces flat looking images. Not having watched the DVD at that stage, some of the Lightsphere techniques were not the best. Still it produced plenty of white light on the display with soft shadows giving a good depth to the images.
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