Diffuse

Over the past few years I've worked with both ring and twin flashes, but they're difficult to diffuse and tend to produce harsh highlights and shadows, so late last year I made the decision to go back to a traditional directional flash unit. For my birthday in December R gave me a Godox V860iii, and for Christmas a Cygnustech diffuser. (I'd like to say here that the service from Cygnustech was especially impressive: the diffuser turned up from Australia just twelve days after the order was placed, easily outpacing inland delivery of one of my birthday cards, which arrived shortly before New Year.) But what with one thing and another - the one thing being winter birding, and the other thing being the bizarre reluctance I always develop towards unboxing and turning on new bits of equipment - until now this new flash gear has sat unused in my study.

Today, though, was very much not a day for birding, or really even for leaving the house, so I decided to screw my courage to the sticking place and take my new kit out of its boxes. The Godox manual, unsurprisingly, made me want to pack everything straight back up again, and after forty minutes of watching instructional videos on YouTube I'd almost lost the will to live, but after a cup of coffee, a small snack, another cup of coffee, and another, larger snack, I regrouped, locked the flash unit on the R5, pushed a few buttons until I got it working in ETTL mode, and wandered around the house and garden photographing a few things.

Once I had some test images I turned to the diffuser. Cygnustech's instructions are basic, but understandable, and luckily the hood is so simply designed that it doesn't take a genius to work out how to bend it around the camera and attach it between the flash unit and the lens. Having done that, I repeated my mini-safari around the house and garden, re-photographing the same subjects I'd shot earlier. The difference was astonishing. I suddenly remembered a comment made by a friend of mine (who's a much better macro photographer than I am), when he heard which flash and diffuser I was getting: "Game-changing," he said - and they are. I'm very pleased indeed with the flash, which is powerful without being ridiculously heavy, and which I'll also be able to use with the heads from my Godox twin flash to create a three-flash set-up, should I ever want to. But the diffuser is absolutely superb, converting the harsh flash to warm, soft light. I can't wait to try it on some invertebrates that are shinier than these little seed weevils, to see how it works on those pesky specular highlights.

My second photo this evening shows some raindrops on one of the silvery male catkins of a little goat willow - which we always called pussy willow when I was a child, presumably because those catkins are as furry and strokable as kittens' paws. The un-diffused version of this image had harsh highlights all along the stem, as well as on the buds and the water droplets, but I find this one very pleasing.