Lighting Essentials: learn how to light like a pro
Lighting Essentials for Photographers Home

 

One Light: When it is a beauty dish, it can be very dramatic.

Beauty Dish Simplicity on Lighting-essentials.com
click to enlarge

Here is a 'contact sheet' of the shoot.

If you would like to host a Lighting Essentials
Workshop in your city or town, it is as
simple as contacting me. I am happy
to discuss the arrangements with
you and show you how you can
host and attend free!
Just send me an email for more info.

Shooting Model Composites - The DVD
KS0001

This 2 Disc episode of The Killer Series shows you how to make Model Composites a profitable part of your photography. Watch as Don teaches you how to pose an inexperienced model, how to easily create beautiful light inside the studio or on location. Watch Scott's "Step by Step" Photoshop movies and learn how to produce dramatic image enhancements. Load and use the same Actions that Don & Scott use to create great looking images for the models' composite card or portfolio.

Click here for more information.

Lighting Essentials 1

The purpose of this DVD is to help photographers understand that high quality lighting can be done with inexpensive tools. Sure it's nice to have the latest and greatest, but all too often photographers think that it is the tools that give them the quality image and not their own talent.

If you are starting your photographic career, adding people to your portfolio, or simply wanting to make better portraits of your friends and family, this DVD will help you get started immediately. If you own a digital camera, these techniques will boost your lighting quality and provide a solid platform on which to build your own set of lighting tricks and techniques.

Click here for more information.

20 PHOTOSHOP Movies

Love Photoshop? So do I. Here's a great little Photoshop DVD with over 20 tutorials from Mild to Wild.

For more information click here.

 

Simple Beauty Dish Drama

A beauty dish is one of the most fun, and unique light modifiers for people shooters. It's very 'poppy' light, combined with a focused throw of light makes it ideal when you want to create a definite direction to the lighting. Most beauty dishes are metal parabolic with a very flat pan. The strobe is placed through the back of the pan and a small covering over the head keeps the brightness of the strobe from creating a hot spot. The movie is at the bottom of the left column.

Cheyenne lit with a beauty dish on Lighting Essentials

You can see the deep shadows under the eyes, nose and chin. This sculpting light is dramatic and fun to work with. It also adds drama to the rest of Cheyenne, with highlight and shadow. Notice how the powerful, diffused light gives texture to the fur coat. You can see in all of these pictures how effective a small piece of white board is for a hair light. Subtle, but definitely there. I like subtle and dramatic mixed.

Cheyenne lit with a beauty dish on Lighting Essentials

In this shot I moved slightly off center and had Cheyenne keep her head toward the light. That way I was able to use the dramatic light as a side lit situation. You can try this on all kinds of subjects, but keep in mind that an imperfect complexion will be more evident with this light than a soft box or umbrella. On this shot I added a fill card to camera right to light the hair a bit as it blew back. (All shots image)

The flat pan keeps the light more focused, and also lets the light fall off quicker. This allows the photographer to really sculpt the light, to create shadows on edges of the face that can really bring out the features. The small dish in front of the light bounces that main light back and into the larger pan. The light ends up being both focused and diffused.

In the shots of Cheyenne (Model Mayhem # 535094), I decided to not use any fill. Her beautiful, angular features were something I wanted to feature. I placed the beauty dish high over here and angled it down. this would cause dramatic shadows below the nose, eyelids, and chin. The quick fall-off was increased by not using fill cards for the sides of her face. I wanted as much drama as possible.

This is the beauty dish I use most. It is a 22" Norman. You can see the small dish in front of where the strobe head is and how the light then gets distributed around the dish instead of having a hot spot where the strobe would be.

The beauty dish was placed on a boom to keep it over the camera angle but without stands or any other things getting in the way of the shot. Remember, the light is only about 2 - 2.5 feet from her and I am shooting from much farther back.

I didn't want her hair to simply fade into the background, so I added a subtle hair light by using a small white card to add highlights. The card was placed on a second boom and positioned straight up above her head. The point of this placement is that it would get the full force of the beauty dish light, and the hair would have this wonderful bright area to reflect. Hair is round, so every hair would have a highlight on it and that opens up the hair and adds an edge.

You can see the way the light falls off on the edge of Cheyenne's face. That small shadow tends to sculpt the face and give it dimension. The deep shadow under the chin is a result of the light being quite high over her. I wanted this deep dramatic effect.

When I added the fan and moved a little to the right of the dish, I noticed that the hair blowing back was going a bit dark. I then added a fill card (small V-Card) to the camera right side of the hair to open it up a bit. You can see the movie on the left column near the top. You can see the shots as they were taken here.

There are many ways to use beauty dishes, and this is one of the simplest. Keep it close, keep it straight over the camera angle and use the shadows for sculpting the face and creating drama. We will have more beauty dish tutorials in the coming months.

If you are wanting to build a DIY beauty dish, there is a wonderful inexpensive way to do it at DIYPhotography.net. The beautiful and talented Madison shares her Turkey Pan Beauty Light construction with us. Can't get better light for under a buck, thirty.

Put your picture on real US Postage!
 
All content copyright 2007 by Don Giannatti