The Beauty dish

But which beauty dish?
Lencarta offers beauty dishes in both 40cm and 70cm diameters in both silver and white finish and all four have both honeycombs and diffusers available!

For our example photos we used the 70cm silver finish, both with and without a honeycomb and with and without a diffuser.

Basically, the beauty dish is a very directional light that can be used to accentuate the bone structure and good complexion of a model - which is a polite way of saying that it isn't ideal for people with poor bone structure and poor complexion because it's a hard, unforgiving light that emphasises faults as well as qualities...

It's a hard light which creates a sharp, yet still smooth shadow edge transfer. It can be used as the sole light, or as the key light. In all of the shots below, it was the only light used.

The light can be harsh, it’s meant to be. Soft lighting can be good for people whose complexions are less than perfect but soft lighting doesn’t bring out the best when people have good features!

Typically, the beauty dish is positioned high and square to the model, to create the trademark shadows under the nose, lower lip and chin - in fact it is one of the very few light shaping tools that produces a very different effect when used in a different position,.as in this shot, above right, of the same model.

Of course, as this 'legs' shot taken by French fashion photographer Marc Gouguenheim demonstrates, the subject doesn't need to be a face and the beauty dish can be used in a different position if required. In fact the beauty dish is just as useful for creative still life shots as it is for portraits or fashion photography.

Let's move on to some comparison shots with the various options.
This is how I set up the shot of 'Louisa' (my well behaved mannequin head).

Louisa was sitting with a white wall 10' behind her.The wall was unlit. I leave the backgrounds unlit in this series so that you can see how much effect the light has on the background, and so that light reflected from the background doesn't interfere with the lighting on the subject. If backgrounds need to be lit they need to be lit separately, because they are separate subjects.

Each shot was set up with the beauty dish as close as it could be placed to the subject, in fact you can see the edge of the beauty dish (or the edge of the diffuser) in the extreme top right corner.

Let's start off with the 70cm beauty dish with the diffuser fitted to it. It still works as a beauty dish with the diffuser fitted because the light is very controlled, and it sculpts the shape of the face beautifully -  it has created shadows under the eyes, nose, lower lip and chin as well as under the cheek - but the shadows are far less harsh and the overall contrast is lower.  In fact, with the diffuser fitted the beauty dish almost becomes a perfectly round softbox, which produces perfectly round catchlights in the eyes - which unfortunately cannot be seen in these example shots because the 'eyes' are painted onto the mannequin.

Now, if we take the diffuser off and use the beauty dish 'bare' we get a much stronger effect.
The hair looks much more alive, the shadows are much more clearly defined and the contrast is higher. A downside is that any glare from the skin will be more visible, so good makeup becomes more important.

What effect does adding the honeycomb have? Well, apart from the obvious benefit of being able to use the beauty dish as a massive hairlight or other backlight, this is what we get when we fit the honeycomb to the beauty dish. The shadows are now much more clearly defined, the area lit by the beauty dish is now much smaller than it was and the overall result is much more dramatic and eye-catching.

So, the choice seems to be between using the beauty dish on its own, or with the diffuser or with the honeycomb - except that there's a very useful 4th choice - you can use it with both the honeycomb and the diffuser!

We now have higher overall contrast with lower local contrast, and for many shots this can be the ideal combination.

All of these examples were produced with the Lencarta 70cm beauty dish with the silver finish. The new white finish beauty dishes produce a softer light, which can be a tremendous advantage when less clearly defined shadow transfer edges are required, and the white finish also completely avoids the 'double shadow' that can occur when using a honeycomb with a silvered light source.

The Lencarta white beauty dishes are unique, because the few other beauty dishes that are available with a white finish have a white enameled finish that is far less smooth in its effect than the matt finish of the Lencarta. The only downside of the matt finish is that it produces a little less light, but as beauty dishes are normally used very close to the subject that is very unlikely to become a problem.

And the 40cm beauty dish? Well, used at a very close distance as with these example shots, the only real difference between the two sizes is that the 40cm version, used in the photo on the right, produces a slightly harder light and covers a smaller area.

The difference in size becomes clear when shooting with the beauty dish much further away - the 40cm version cannot produce such a soft light, simply because it is physically smaller. Sometimes a very hard light is required; in a large studio, a 70cm beauty dish can be moved further away to make it smaller relative to the size of the subject, in a small studio this may not be possible, and then the 40cm version comes into its own.

All of these shots are straight out of the camera, with no post processing work whatever except for re-sizing - but of course retouching, colour adjustments etc are very much part of the normal image production process and are generally considered to be essential whenever a beauty dish is used.

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