Silly Saturday: Flash Lighting Experiments

I'm working on a talk on close-up and macro photography which I've been persuaded to give, along with a colleague, at our camera club on Tuesday. One of the topics I'm covering is quirky or makeshift lighting setups. Those of you who follow my journal will probably know that I'm rather partial to "Heath Robinson" solutions to photographic problems and I needed  some photos to illustrate things. This is one of the techniques I wanted to show.

I read recently about using a piece of white paper to soften the shadows produced when using direct on-camera flash. "Proper" flashguns often come with a clip-on diffuser to achieve this effect, but little pop-up (or small clip-on guns) don't. So I thought I'd see how the sheet-of-paper idea worked. The photo on the left is taken without the paper; that on the right is taken with it: I think the shadows are much nicer on the second one. I just made a hole in the paper big enough to give a tight fit over the front of the lens and it stayed in place nicely

The paper did of course reduce the light to some extent - I had to open the aperture by about 2 stops when the paper was in position.

It may look a bit silly (so I'll tag it for Silly Saturday) but it works! Many thanks to admirer for hosting the Sils challenge.

(Note : We have 2 Christmas cacti - one flowered before Christmas and now this one is flowering after Christmas - neither managed their timing very accurately!)