Experiment

This is the result of my second experiment in achieving extra diffusion for my Godox MF-12 twin flash heads: this time I scrunched some bubble wrap into the diffusers, in the hope that it would bounce the light around a little more. In that it worked about as well as the gauze I'd tried before, but it still left me with a specular highlight issue, and added a new one of its own - the bubble wrap was very faintly blue, and the colour cast in some (though strangely not all) of my photos was hard to get rid of. 

The Cinnamon Bug wasn't happy about being pursued around the sedge, and by the time I'd been back to the kitchen and swapped the bubble wrap for gauze to try for a comparison shot it had moved down into the depths of the plant. Luckily I'd also photographed a Hawthorn Shieldbug with bubble wrap diffusion and that was still sitting in the same place on the dogwood, so I was able to shoot it again and confirm my instinct that the gauze gave a better result overall.

The TL:DR version of all that is that I'm still not perfectly happy. I've even spent some time this afternoon looking at flash systems, and wondering if it wouldn't be better to move back to a speedlight, which I could use with a Cygnustech diffuser or something similar. I have to remind myself though that bugs are tricky in any light: when I posted this shot last month, I chose it because it was the only one out of a sequence of four frames in which my head had blocked the sun from falling directly on the bug. This one, which was shot in full sun, is positively glittery.

So I won't make any rash decisions, and for now I'll just keep experimenting. Next up: baking parchment. I'm not confident, but I am... hopeful.

R: C6, D11.