With external flashes, I’m a big fan of the Lumiquest mini-softbox, which is something I use primarily with a flash bracket for event work. Using a mini-softbox, I can get good light control for subjects that are within 4-15 feet in front of me, without harsh shadows. I typically use this in situations where the light is not very good (harsh overhead lighting, for instance) and when bouncing is impractical (high or dark ceilings).

The GF1’s flash head is incredibly small and subsequently results in a very harsh quality of light – particularly at further distances. The size of a light source in relation to its distance to the subject is one of the factors that goes into the “hardness” of the light. In general, from the same distance, a larger lightsource is going to produce a “softer” quality of light. With this in mind, I felt like creating a mini-softbox similar to the Lumiquest box would give me the best chance at good quality light from the GF1.
What I came up with is a mini-softbox made of the following materials:

Heavy Frost Filter (Bogen/Manfrotto #129)
Gaffer Tape
Velcro

I started by taking the “soft” side of the Velcro and cutting it down to fit on the top area of the GF1’s flash. This Velcro came with one of my Lumiquest softboxes and is very thin.



The Heavy Frost diffusion came in 12”x12” size, from which I’ve cut pieces off of over the years for various purposes. The piece I cut off for this purpose was about 5”x2 ½”. I then eyeballed attaching the Velcro (the “grabby” side) in such a way that one tab can slip underneath the GF1’s flash, loop around and attach to the Velcro on the back of the flash – this tab is about ½” wide by an 1 ¼” long. The other side is designed to attach to the “top” side, and is fairly flat – 1 ¼” wide by 1/2 “ tall (this tab has “soft” Velcro on the other side in case you wanted to “stack” a gel on it, etc.

After that, I “edged” the diffusor to make it a bit more rigid and robust for being slipped into/out of a pocket, etc. From there, do two folds – the “top” fold is about 1 ½” tall, the “face” is about 2” tall, and the underside is about 1”. When this is complete, the “top” side can fold into the face, making it easy to stow. This slips nicely into a pocket, and nicely into the mesh front side of the bag I use as my “accessory” bag for the GF1.







The end result is a “face” that is just about as large as you can get at a reasonable distance:




Getting good results with this setup isn’t a walk in the park, unfortunately. Most of the reasons behind this are detailed in my thread on using the GF1’s Built-In Flash. Additionally, you can see pictured here color correction gels – I’m using “Stacked” CTO (Color Temperature Orange) filters to get the color temperature around a “Tungsten” value of about 2900K. Since I primarily use my flash indoors balancing with the ambient light, this gives me a balance in the photos that to my eye, is more natural. You can buy these filters from most reputable photo shops. B&H sells a “strobist” flash gel kit from Rosco that’s a good starting point.

The samples below were all shot with the stacked CTO’s and the mini-softbox pictured above. Shot in AV mode, balancing the ambient and flash exposures. Different levels of Exposure Compensation and sometimes Flash Exposure Compensation were used in the photos. This is something you kind of just have to get a “feel” for. All were processed in Lightroom, but shot with a manual WB setting of 3200K for previewing in camera.









All in all, I think that if you take time to understand the GF1's quirks, use color correction gels and a diffuser like the one describe here, you can greatly improve on the GF1's out of