Originally posted by nu12ul i am wondering whether toi invest in a diffuser and what benefits am i looking at. I get the softer light concept but i have also read somewhere that bouncing it of a wall or ceiling is sufficient and having a diffuser makes things more difficult for ttl as the flash does not know that the diffuser is on there so it does not know how best to expose?
any tips would be gratefully received.
regards
A diffusor (eg stofen) doesn't make the light softer, it just sprays it around more. The situations where you want to spray the light all over the room are fairly rare, instead you want directional light coming from left or right and falling on your subject which you achieve by bouncing.
pTTL though has no trouble with diffusors on flash heads, not sure who told you that but they're wrong. The flash itself can have trouble because a diffusor robs it of a stop of 2 of light, which can make the difference of a flash being able to deliver the light asked of it or not. But the exposure calculation itself is not stuffed up by a diffusor.
Bottom line: no you do not need a diffusor. First learn to shoot in manual mode on your camera, pTTL on your flash, ride exposure using FEC, and bounce flash off walls. Once you figure that out you will see the (rare) situations that you need a diffusor.
The best site for on camera flash technique by far is this one:
http://neilvn.com/tangents/flash-photography-techniques/