So my Lightsphere Collapsible arrived in the mail and of course I wanted to put it to test. Also on test are bare flash, generic cheap (like $3 cheap) stofen type omnibounce and another cheapo (around $8) weird diffuser that’s more of a soft bag with black portion on the back wall with reflective material inside. Is there even a name for that type? In the test I’ll refer to them as follows:

• no diff – bare flash, no diffuser
• omni – omnibounce
• soft – that weird soft thing
• dome – Lightsphere with dome
• sphere – Lightsphere without dome

I used Canon 450D with Speedlite 580 II flash on a tripod about 1,5m from the subject oriented for portraits. 50mm f/1.4 lens at f/8, 1/200 sec, ISO 100. Flash was on ETTL for convenience and white balance was set to flash. Test took place in my room with white walls and ceiling. Ceiling light was on and it has kinda leans on the yellow side when it comes to lights. My table is wood colored so that is most likely the culprit to the color cast in some images. Only thing I did to the pictures was a small crop and resize for web.

The omnibounce is easiest and fastest to attach, with Lightsphere trailing just a tad behind. The softer one by far is the hardest to get in place as it has elastic band that you need to stretch over the flash. It is also most likely to fall off, while the other two hold still very firmly. I shook the flash rather violently just by holding on to the Lightsphere and it didn’t come off. The soft diffuser and Lightsphere can be fitted in both 580 and 430 flashes and other brands too, not just Canon. The omnibounce only fits the 580 but it is so cheap you could get bunch of them for every flash you’ve ever owned and still not pay as much as for the Lightsphere.

Straight

Flash aimed straight at the subject.

At 45° angle

Flash at an angle and sadly aimed straight at my table and whatnot so there’s loads of surfaces to bounce off of.

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Up

Flash aimed straight up.

Conclusions

The space where I conducted this experiment was far from optimal. But how often in real life you get optimal place to photograph? In any case I think we all can agree that all of them suck when aimed straight on (under these conditions). Although the Lightsphere with dome had best result. At an angle all were pretty much horrible also.

Bounced from the ceiling the performance was substantially better as one might expect. What surprised me most was that the shot without diffuser turned out so well compared to rest. And of course I forgot to test the bounce card that’s built in the flash (partly ‘cos it doesn’t work with camera in portrait orientation). Also I obviously forgot to test the straight/45°up configuration. But still I think these are pretty good results on how these work. I will conduct a test with the camera oriented for landscape and update it here.

I don’t own any of them larger bounce card type diffusers/reflectors so that’s the reason I didn’t include one in this test. If someone wants to sponsor me one I’ll be happy to redo the test. But in the meanwhile I’ll be happy shooting with my Lightsphere.

If you’re more of a DIY type of a person feel free to share your tips or go search the interwebs for instructions or check out some weird contraptions other people made.

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About the Author:  Hiya there! My name is Vesa. I'm a digital art enthusiast / photographer / web geek residing in Tampere, Finland. My full time day job is surfing the web and creating mind melting digital art and whatnot. On my free time I study Interactive Media at TAMK University of Applied Sciences. Check out my übersome website of incredimasingness! And to be extra cool person read the rest of my posts.

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Tags: camera, canon, collapsible, comparison, diffuser, flash, gary fong, lightsphere, photography, speedlight, speedlite, stofen

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 11th, 2010 at 15:32 and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.