For a long time I've been using a kind of thin packing foam as diffusers. I originally got some wrapped round a new LCD monitor. This worked very nicely. Over a period of time I acquired various pieces of similar foam, and have been cutting all sorts of little flash diffusers from all these bits of foam, assuming they would all work as well...
Wrong!
After someone else pointed out that foam doesn't diffuse as much as you might think, I started looking more closely at the different pieces of foam I was using. The original stuff which worked well is white to look at, you can not see through it, and it has a fairly fine 'grain'. The piece of foam I was using on the Lacewing had a very different structure. The 'bubbles' in the foam are much larger, and more transparent. Hence it was not diffusing the light as much as I wanted.
The next experiment was some paper. Kleenex tissue was advised but I
was slightly fearful of small bits of fluff coming off of tissue paper onto the
specimen so my first tests were with a bit of standard printer/copier
paper.This diffuses extremely well. In fact, I think it diffuses too much!
This second shot is a comparison shot with some foam as the diffuser but everything else exactly the same.
At full resolution there is slightly more detail visible in the hairy parts of the bee in the first shot (with the paper diffuser). However the consensus seems to be that the second shot looks better. The light is just too flat in the first image.
Of course some subjects require much more diffusion than others - for instance Beetles, particularly black Ground Beetles and Ladybirds. So I guess it's best to have a variety of diffusers available, and test diffusers on each subject before going through the whole stack!
One of these days I will get around to purchasing some proper diffusion material (e.g. from these people but I enjoy the hunt for junk that can be re-used!
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