RecentlyI have received some new light modifiers for my studio flashes. The most important modifier for me was the beauty dish. So I asked Thalita to help me to test them out. And so we did.
I have got a beauty dish with silver inlay. There are white and silver beauty dishes available and the silver beauty dish tends to give a bit more punchier light. Normally I would choose the white one because I prefer soft light in my photography. However I am planning to use the beauty dish also in outside environments. And when you are outside, you will need all the flash power you can get when your strobes are competing with the sun. So therefore I decided to buy the silver beauty dish instead of the white one. Another solution to make the light a bit softer would be to add a piece of diffusion material to the beauty dish and soften it that way. That would be my plan B.
But after we created some images with it it was apparent that the light from the beauty was soft enough to my taste. No extra diffusion was needed. So that much for plan B. Beside the type and size of the light modifier, the distance of the light source to the subject also influences the hardness of the light. In our tests I placed the beauty dish at a distance to her face that is equal to the diameter of the beauty dish (approximately at 50 cm). For my taste that resulted in a nice light quality.
Beside the beauty dish we combined some tests with a large rectangular soft box with an edge mask mounted to it. The edge mask creates a dark background with a rim light around the subject.
Here are some results of the beauty dish test:
-
- Thalita – Beauty dish
-
- Thalita – Beauty dish head shot
-
- Thalita – Beauty dish half length shot
-
- Thalita – Beauty dish and edge mask background
For the images with the white background I used a studio strobe with a big rectangular soft box with a white diffuser on it. The main light of course was the beauty dish. Because I used the beauty dish a bit from above, I used a small octa box from below to fill in the shadows. For the image with the dark background I used the edge mask diffuser on the same rectangular soft box. So all in all I used three studio strobes:
- The beauty dish as the main light
- A small octa box as a fill light
- A big rectangular soft box as the background light
Thank you Thalita for being so patient and being such a pleasant company as always. You did a great job.