The beauty dish is one of the most commonly used light modifiers for beauty and portrait work, but being popular doesn’t mean that it’s an easy-to-use modifier without any quirks and intricacies. In fact, you can only harness the true magic of the beauty dish if you know the principles behind it inside-out. In this article, I will explain everything you need to know when using a beauty dish.
Lindsay Adler is an accomplished portrait photographer and educator, and in this 11.5-minute video she explains three different, versatile, and easy-to-master lighting setups using a beauty dish as the key light.
I recently got bored and decided to expand a super-budget project I'm working on. I love gridded beauty dishes for dramatic artsy stuff, beauty, and as a generally very versatile modifier. However, even a cheap one is out of budget for this project. So... I made one.
Photographer and Profoto Legend of Light Miguel Quiles made this 7-minute video in which he shares 5 different ways he likes to use a beauty dish for portrait lighting.
This 12-minute tutorial from photographer Joel Grimes demonstrates two methods for creating dramatic portraits using a minimal amount of gear. Both techniques use a beauty dish; the first with a single light source and the second with the addition of 2 edge lights.
Beauty dishes are great pieces of equipment to have in your lighting arsenal, but they come at a price. You can spend hundreds of dollars on a dish, yet using a cheap shoot-through umbrella can easily produce the same effect, as this 10-minute tutorial by Joe Edelman shows.
The Beauty Dish is revered by many photographers for having a soft, but contrasty quality of light. The classic design puts the flash tube behind an opaque or translucent tube cover, which helps eliminate a central hot spot. Like umbrellas, beauty dishes are available with white or silver interiors and can be fitted with a “sock” or grid to control quality and spread of light even more.
Getting into fashion or beauty photography doesn't have to involve getting lots of expensive gear right away. As New York City-based photographer Jeff Rojas shows you in this short tutorial, you can capture three totally different looks with a very small footprint and just a couple of lights.
Profoto today announced a reboot of its classic Beauty Dish from the 1980s. The new version of this classic tool is both lightweight and collapsible.
Elinchom have just announced the Litemotiv, a new extension to their lineup of softboxes. The two new modifiers are made up of sixteen sides and come in two distinct sizes. According to the company, theses monster softboxes help to create “close to perfect catchlights.”
A few weeks ago, we shared a video by photographer Karl Taylor that gave you a behind the scenes look at what a day-long fashion shoot in his studio was like. And even though a few of our readers poked fun at the video's obvious product placement, a lot of people learned a thing or two and came back with followup questions regarding the light modifiers that Taylor was using throughout the day.
Fortunately for us, Taylor was listening, and has produced this very informative follow-up video in which he discusses the differences between his go-to modifiers, complete with side-by-side comparisons.
Photographer Kirsty Wiseman didn't want to shell out money for a real beauty dish -- she doesn't really need one -- so she built this funny-looking DIY beauty dish for a few pennies using a couple of Styrofoam bowls, a couple of cocktail sticks, and a piece of aluminum foil. After playing around with it, Wiseman was delightfully surprised to find that her gear hack actually produced decent results.
Industrial design student Hunter Frerich came up with a simple and cheap DIY …
Beauty dishes are pricey, and so are dedicated cases for carrying them around. If you want a cheap and …