This review is mainly for chrisconnolly's benefit but, heck, someone else might find it useful. Anyway.

So. I'm not a professional photographer and everything I know about photography comes from an incredibly informal trial and error process. I don't like to get too technical about any of it; I just want pretty pictures. I mainly use my cameras to take pictures of makeup, cake, crap I buy and drunk people in dive bars.

Enter the Lumiquest soft screen flash diffuser thingie. It's cheap, it's basic and it looks a hell of a lot nicer than sticking a piece of toilet paper over my flash.

For makeup close ups (I get exactly zero natural light in my apartment), this diffuses flash pretty well. I prefer the diffusion I get from a simple piece of toilet paper or tissue, but only just slightly. And this thing has the major advantage of not getting in the way of the pop-up. Even though it doesn't do anything for subjects at a distance, I still like it for bar scenarios because it seems to reduce blinking. It sits nicely so I haven't gotten any weird flash lines or anything. I know there are a lot of pop-up flash diffusers that are smaller and cover the sides but this one's cheaper and more universal.

At home I pretty much still use toilet paper instead of bothering to rig the Lumiquest up. My camera doesn't have a prominent nameplate for this to hook onto at the front so it involves a slightly ugly velcro thing. I've been holding it in place at the front and that's pretty annoying, but now that I know I'm keeping it I'll attach it and use it all the time when I'm on the move.

Anyone else use something like this? What do you think of it?