Here’s a nifty infographic by B&H on how light affects your subject (or is it object? I vote for the latter…). It’s about understand the effects of various light modifiers on a subject. Explains B&H:

We’ve been hard at work trying to demonstrate to you the effects of various lighting modifiers. So we created this quick infographic to show you how different lighting modifiers can affect a subject. We placed the light source in exactly the same spot for each photo. As we changed the lighting modifier for each photo, we also changed the power output of the Impact LiteTrek to accommodate to the various diffusion properties of each light modifier.