While I appreciate all Kodiak's hard work here, I have to say this level of technical subtlety leaves me a bit cold. The differences are tiny and I can't say it would make any difference to me either way. And if this is all anyone's got to worry about, then they are master portrait artists for sure. Personally, I can think of at least a dozen other far more important considerations for a successful session, and most of them nothing to do with lighting.
Big light = soft, small light = hard. If you just get that bit right, you'll not go far wrong, regardless. Umbrella, softbox, beauty dish - at the same size/distance, there's precious little to choose between them. And certainly nothing that's really going to make or break the shot.
Along kind of similar lines, on the current sequins thread a portrait of Gabby Logan has been posted. Our Garry has rightly criticised it for being a poor example of how to light a sequinned dress, and in the context of that thread it is a bad example. But that misses the point - it's a fashion-style portrait, bright and brash with big vivacious smile. It's a great shot of Gabby IMHO, obviously good enough to make the cover of the Express Saturday magazine, and the splash of blitzed highlights suits the image and the composition, even if it's theoretically a technical flaw in the lighting. More than any other genre, portraiture is about the subject and getting the most from them. The right pose, at the right moment, with the right gesture and expression - they're worth a thousand beauty dishes.
Oops! Bit of a rant there
I've clicked on "Like" because I agree, largely. Certainly, there are very many other factors that can make or break a good portrait and which, to most people anyway, are far more important. The average and typical reader of this forum needs to think about these factors rather than the technical excellence (or otherwise) of specific light modifiers.
There's a photo, by
Yousuf Karsh, of Winston Churchill, now appearing on a new banknote. Karsh didn't have any fancy modifiers, he took his famous photo of Churchill back in the days when photographic lighting equipment barely existed and photographers needed real knowledge, plus people skills, to get the results that they wanted, and of course those skills are just as important now. Allegedly, Karsh got the look by snatching Churchill's cigar out of his mouth, which p***ed him off and produced the right look.
But I can't agree with this specific statement
Big light = soft, small light = hard. If you just get that bit right, you'll not go far wrong, regardless. Umbrella, softbox, beauty dish - at the same size/distance, there's precious little to choose between them. And certainly nothing that's really going to make or break the shot.
Simply because, in the world of high end fashion and cosmetic photography, it just isn't correct, these are the areas in which tiny differences separate bad shots from good ones, good ones from outstanding ones, winners from losers.
I applaud Kodiak for posting his reviews, even though I can't agree with much of what he says.
I don't agree because removing a diffuser from a softbox and adding some kind of deflector plate results, not an a beauty dish, but in a softbox that has a deflector instead of a diffuser. That makes it another, potentially useful type of modifier but it doesn't make it a beauty dish. And sticking an expensive brand name on it doesn't make it good, it just makes it expensive.
A real beauty dish isn't octagonal, it's round, and has a stepped design that creates rings of light. The best one on the market, by a country mile, is made by Mola and there's nothing else like it - well, actually there is, a Chinese copy that's still much too expensive for most people.
The 'standard' beauty dishes, which all look very similar to each other (but which are in fact different because, in the world of physics, small differences in the size, shape and position of the deflector can make a big difference) aren't really beauty dishes at all, they are made in a Chinese factory that makes industrial lighting reflectors - yes, these are the old fashioned lampshades used for factory lighting, and called "Beauty dishes" (or, as the Chinese call them, "Radar Reflectors" but they are still lampshades.
To get them to behave like real beauty dishes, the standard deflector plate as supplied needs to be thrown away and a new one, which looks similar but which isn't, needs to be substituted. The beauty dish will then focus as expected, or at least it will if the mounting arrangement and the position of the flash tube is right, a difference of just a milimetre or two can make an enormous difference to the performance.
Most people can't tell the difference beween a beauty dish that works and one that doesn't, so here at Lencarta we've given up on the current design and have
sold off our stock of them at half price, which is below cost price. As this product has now gone, presumably it's OK to post that link. In future, people who want to buy on price can get them from Ebay sellers, including some who claim to be photographic specialists.
