Lit with a Beauty Dish
If I could have only one light modifier it would be a 22″ white Beauty Dish. If I could have two – it would be a Beauty Dish with a grid. Nothing quite replicates the look.
1/160 s at f/5.6, ISO 160, 100 mm
The key (main light) for these shots was a 600 Ws strobe with the Beauty Dish and a honeycomb grid, placed on a boom frontally and overhead, approximately 4 feet away from the model. There is something magical about a Beauty Dish – it gives light which is not really soft, not really hard, yet focused, edgy and “three-dimensional”. It is a distinct look, different from what can be achieved with a softbox or with an umbrella.
The grid tightened the beam of light and added some contrast and drama to the look. I also used a small white reflector, camera left, for just a touch of fill light. There is a big light falloff from the Beauty Dish but I actually like it in these shots.
1/160 s at f/5.6, ISO 200, 105 mm
A white seamless paper background helped me draw attention to the model. To eliminate any texture and shades of gray from the background I illuminated it evenly with two hot shoe flashes set to 24 mm zoom and sitting in two 43″ silver umbrellas (I chose small flashes mainly for portability, though more powerful lights would let me shoot at a higher aperture / lower ISO). All the flashes were set in manual mode and fired with PocketWizard radio triggers.
1/160 s, f/5.0 ISO 250, 120 mm
My camera settings killed the ambient leaving me only with the light which I controlled. I adjusted the background lights until I was seeing a spike in the whites region of the histogram on my camera, and the key light simply until I was happy with the results – maybe a third of a stop more than for a typical portrait.
1/160 s at f/5.6, ISO 160, 95 mm
In case you are wondering how much post-processing I did, below is the first shot right from the camera (a preview of a completely unedited RAW image after importing to Lightroom).
Unprocessed image
Unlike this RAW preview from Lightroom, a JPEG preview at the back of my camera was already contrasty and sharpened by the “Standard” Picture Style (in-camera Styles do not affect RAW images and only get baked into JPEGs). But I prefer to take things in my hands and adjust the settings to taste.
So I pushed the whites a bit until the background was pure white, tweaked the tonal curve for a better contrast, added a pinch of clarity and sharpening, and slightly desaturated the skin. Oh, and I removed that reflector.
The Beauty Dish with a grid and the white seamless background were my primary tools for achieving this look. Previously I used a Beauty Dish in a different setup for overpowering the sun. Be sure to check out that post!
Filed under Photo shoots, Photography, Tutorial, Tagged back light, Beauty Dish, flash, grid, key light, lighting, photo session, PocketWizard, strobe, technique, umbrella
RSS
Facebook
Google+
Twitter
500px
Comments
Nikolay
March 22, 2013
So if i understand correctly if you want to fire 4 speedlights you will have to buy 4 receivers using the trigger to fire them all? Why can't you use say Canon 580EX II as the master and then link the other speedlights as slaves? and only by 1 receiver and connect to your master speedlight?
Tom (@TomOnTheRoof)
March 23, 2013
Nikolay, thank you for your question! I used 3 lights, each with a radio receiver, and one transmitter on the camera. If you want to fire 4 lights reliably you may want to use 4 receivers…
But assuming you are working in a studio environment and in manual flash mode – you may fire just a single flash by radio, or even with a sync cord, and the remaining flashes with optical slave sensors (external “photocells”, if the flashes don’t have them built in). This setup can work fine though the low-cost optical slaves have limitations. They may turn out not sensitive enough when the ambient levels are relatively high, may react to a flash of another photographer (and with few exceptions on the market – can be triggered with a preflash).
Alternatively, if you use small dedicated flashes, you can control them with your camera’s wireless system. You need an on-camera master (some cameras allow using a popup flash for this purpose), and the sensors of the slave flashes must “see” the light from the master – ideally they should be pointing towards it. Even the Canon flash system, with all its quirks, can yield wonderful results (though with a Beauty Dish I would rather use a studio strobe).
Radio triggers definitely add to the cost but since I already own them, I prefer to use them. Hands down they are more reliable and easier than the optical methods, especially when the slaves are hidden in lighting mods or when working outdoors. But in the end gear is not the most important, what counts is the image. It's like with cars – both a Porsche and an Opel may take you to the same beautiful location :-)
What do you think?