Posts by John Cornicello

The main purpose of diffusion is to spread light out to cover a wider area, such as providing coverage for a wide angle lens. And depending on the environment (a small room with white walls and ceiling versus a cavernous studio) it will also affect the contrast of a scene. If the diffusion is the same size as the light source it is covering it does NOT soften the light. Quality of light (hard or soft) is determined by the size of the light as seen by the subject. That is the transfer edge of the shadow where things go from highlight to shadow–an abrupt edge means a hard light, a long transition means a soft light. 

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Have you ever had part of your image frame go dark or blank when using flash in your photography?

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To our eyes a flash happens, well, in a flash! It appears instantaneous. But if you were to hook up an oscilloscope and the proper sensor you will see that a flash has a rise, a peak, and a fall. The rise is quite steep and the falloff starts almost immediately, but it then stretches out until the light totally fades. In most situations you don’t need to be concerned at all with the flash duration. It is almost always faster than your shutter speed in normal sync mode (we will talk about high speed sync separately).

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