Nikon Diffuser vs. Gary Fong Lightsphere Lighting Tests

Updated 2014: It’s been two years and my excitement over Gary Fong’s Lightsphere has completely worn off. After enough use and testing, I’ve found nothing that makes the Lightsphere worth being on the flash for anything more than a rare few shots at some weddings. Even though I’ve already paid for it, I leave the LS in the bag for emergencies only, or just when I want to look like I have some sort of highly useful, specialized equipment attached to my flash, even though it makes no real difference in the image.

One problem is a diffuser for on-camera flash is a last resort for me. My first choice is quality ambient light, then off-camera modified flash, then off-camera bounced flash. The last thing I’ll ever do is on-camera flash, and before I use a diffuser, I’ll look for a way to bounce the light. Also, the LS is so heavy, it slams down the flash head ratchet unless you leave it pointing up or locked down at a 90-degree angle.

So let’s say I had to use on-camera flash. I did a bunch of tests with that using a realistic mannequin in my home with vaulted ceilings that you could bounce off of, not a church where the ceilings are 50 feet high. You can see in those results that there are many better options than the LS, no matter how you use it. In fact, if you compare the shot with the Nikon diffusion dome with the Lightsphere shot, there’s no difference.

Prior to that, I had done some tests with a reflective exercise ball, again not scientific, that showed almost no difference between the stock diffuser and Lightsphere. You can see those tests below. I did three series of shots, each with the flash in a different position to the subject, and each shot in the series with a variation of the flash head angle and modifier. I was shooting in manual exposure mode, triggering with PocketWizard Mini and Flex units on full i-TTL, matrix metering. The equipment was a Nikon D200 and SB-700. In some of the direct lighting shots, you’ll notice the exposure is dark, and that’s because of the reflective nature of the ball. All the shots are straight from camera.

In the butterfly setup, the light is in front of the subject but up high at an angle. There’s not much difference between the Lightsphere and bare light. The primary difference is the Lightsphere warms the light a little bit in this scenario. I don’t know if it will lead to warming in every shot, but perhaps just the color of the ceiling (it’s white, but technically Marshmallow from Sherman Williams) is doing it. The Lightsphere with dome probably provides the softest light, but not by much, and the Lightsphere without the dome is about the same as the bare flash.

In the standard setup, the light is about 45 degrees from the subject to the right and about five feet away. I took shots with the Lightsphere diffuser, with and without dome, and the Nikon diffuser and bare flash. The flash is pointing straight up in all shots. You can see the results are very similar between the Nikon diffuser and Lightsphere. If anything, the Lightsphere is a bit less specular and warmer, but not a lot. Notice with the bare flash that since the light isn’t diffused at the source, the source becomes the ceiling (the larger highlight on top of the ball), and there’s more of a falloff from the top of the ball to the bottom. With the Lightsphere, the light is diffused at the source, so you get a more wrapped light, which I like (first image). However, the Nikon diffusion dome (third image) produces about the same results in these shots.

All of the shots in the last series were taken with the flash on camera and pointed either up or straight at the subject. Notice in the top row, with both diffusers pointed up, neither one is bad. The Nikon diffuser gives you a bit more form than the Lightsphere, which blasts the light everywhere. The bare flash again is more specular with more falloff from top to bottom. But the Lightsphere without dome is also well lit. There’s a big difference when shooting directly at the subject with the Lightsphere and Nikon diffuser; noticeably the Nikon shot is brighter. While neither device is meant to be aimed straight at the subject, I would prefer the brighter image.

I haven’t been able to find more than maybe a 10 percent difference between the Lightsphere and stock diffuser, and as I cover in this article there are much better ways to get quality light than a diffuser. The Lightsphere without the dome is pretty much useless, as it compares similarly to the Nikon diffuser and in some instances bare flash, and in many cases it’s worse.

Fong’s marketing is more clever than most people will realize, and no doubt carefully calculated. In early vidoes, Fong only compares the Lightsphere to direct on-camera flash. Anything is better than direct on-camera flash, including bouncing and stock diffusers, so that makes the Lightsphere look like magic. Put an orange next to an apple, and the difference is obvious. Put an orange next to an orange, not so obvious. Only in later videos, perhaps realizing his blatant gimmickry, does Fong introduce comparisons to other diffusers, but again those are produced in a way that works better for the Lightsphere than anything else (discussed here).

If Fong would compare the Lightsphere to stock diffusers, I think he’d have a tough time selling the Lightsphere, and that’s where I disagree with his marketing. His product is next to useless, but his marketing makes it appear as magic. He’s not alone in this technique, obviously, as there are plenty of scheisters out there selling even more useless products, like the ShamWow, which I tried using to dry off my SUV after washing it only to find that it became saturated almost instantly and then simply spread water around, and when I wrung it out, it didn’t resume picking up much more water.

In one video, Fong suggests that the LS replaces an umbrella, but physics are against him there. One key purpose of a soft box/umbrella is to enlarge the light source, enabling the light to wrap around the subject and ease the transition from light to shadow. No matter how diffuse the Lightsphere makes the light, it doesn’t enlarge the source much, certainly not enough to wrap around a subject as softly as a larger modifier. The LS with dome is still better than bare flash if you want to soften your portrait by about 10 percent. It just doesn’t beat larger diffusers. Fong knows this, but he’s probably hoping you don’t.

So is Fong doing false advertising? Not really. The Lightsphere does what it claims, to some extent; Fong simply fails to mention that a stock diffuser does pretty much the same thing, and bouncing, umbrellas or soft boxes can give you better looks. The key is to do your research before you buy anything, and test it before you use it. The LS doesn’t produce bad shots, and I’d be hard pressed to say any shots with the LS would be worse than the included diffuser. Then again, you can’t go wrong with the included Nikon diffusion dome either and creative bouncing or off-camera flash.

In hindsight I wouldn’t have paid $57 for the LS, although I did get it with the Pro Kit, which came with a bunch of other stuff. For what it does, I’d pay only about $20, $25 at the extreme, because it probably won’t take your images up a full level from the included diffuser.

The Pro kit is a somewhat decent buy because it gives you a usable snoot (also heavy) and color gels, which you can get creative with. You need the LS to hold the gels, so the LS has an additional use there. The Chrome Dome, however, is another useless thing because whatever it does I can do better with off-camera modified flash. It’s rare I’ll ever need to set up a group shot where all I have is on-camera flash because I take my lights — at least one with stand — wherever I go, and I’ll take that look over diffused or bounced on-camera any day.