Sometimes I hate Murphy and his law , you know, the one that says, "if something can go wrong it will go wrong." That's how I felt with this past meetup event. " So what went wrong?" you ask. For starters, the nice field of tall grass had very recently been mowed by the city. All those wonderful insects I had photographed on my previous visit no longer had a home to play in. Instead, our group faced a vast open space that any remaining small critter could spot us coming from a mile away. And don't get me started on the weather. Rain that was supposed to stop early the previous day ended up going on into the night. While rain isn't that big an issue, since it tends to bring the insects out in the morning for some sunbathing and drying out, it did make for some sloshy walking around. Not much fun. The only thing we found were the various species of birds.

As a product photographer I am always tweaking or building light modifiers. Since lighting products is different than lighting people, I find that making my own modifiers is easier than trying to find commercially bought equipment. Plus, it's cheaper and, since I'm fairly handy, appeals to my artistic creativity. With my collection of modifiers growing I thought I'd take inventory and also take stock in the various exposure factors of the modifiers. Specifically with in-line diffusers like diffuser screens and soft boxes. Because the source materials for many diffusers come from a wide range of readily available products, knowing how much light a particular piece of material blocks can be a handy bit of information. So with no particular scientific procedure in mind I set out to determine light loss from the various types of materials I was using in my modifiers. For a quick rundown of what I had to deal with here is a short sample of some of the materials I hav...