The diffusion cloth idea has probably been around for years, but it started for us in the early 1980's. During March of 1984, Al Charnley and I were sitting in his living room making plans to spend a lot of time that spring photographing hepaticas, bloodroot, spring beauty, squirrel corn, violets, and other early spring wildflowers. We were trying to solve several problems that we always encountered when photographing these flowers.
Early wildflowers are a fickle bunch.
Most of these plants won't open up their flowers unless the sun is out. Since they grow in the dead leaves of beach-maple forests in our area, the glare of direct sunshine on the dead leaves surrounding the flowers produces very poor results on film. Furthermore, since there are no leaves on the forest trees when these flowers bloom, there isn't much surrounding vegetation to block the wind which always seems to be blowing during March and April. So there we were, sitting in his living room and sipping on a coke, trying to figure out a way to improve the natural light on the flowers and to block the wind. It occurred to us if we had a portable greenhouse to put over the wildflowers, this would eliminate subject motion problems caused by the wind.