A look at beauty dish vs softbox for portrait work, how to use a beauty dish for dramatic portrait lighting for women, and why light subtractors in studio photography are the secret to that deep, shadowy Hollywood glamour portrait look. The hardest part of capturing this portrait was stopping Meg from laughing as we took it. Meg is our studio assistant (and all-round superstar), and is normally on the other side of the camera. This shot came about because Meg asked me to capture matching portraits of her and her mum, lit in the dramatic style of 1940s Hollywood glamour portrait photography. Here’s how we did it.
The good, the bad and the ugly: beauty dish vs softbox
The light here was provided by a beauty dish, a unique modifier that you can use with studio lights. When you’re thinking about beauty dish vs softbox, the key difference is this: most modifiers soften the light, but a beauty dish reflects it.
It looks like a very shallow bowl, circular and with a plate that covers the flash head to avoid hotspots. Because of its shape, light falls on your subject most strongly from the centre, with a quick fall-off to shadow. This helps to accentuate your subject’s cheekbones, whilst its metallic inner coating creates strong contrast that makes the skin sparkle.
But as is always the case in photography, there’s a compromise. The light from a beauty dish is semi-hard – softer than bare flash but much harder than the light from a softbox. Because of this, it’s very unforgiving, highlighting any flaws in skin tone or makeup. That’s the honest truth of beauty dish portrait photography: it rewards great skin and punishes anything less. Luckily Meg has super-smooth skin and brilliant makeup skills, so I could get away with it.
Knowing how to use a beauty dish well is really about placement. I positioned it horizontally above and in front of Meg, like a lowered chandelier. It took a little fiddling to get it exactly right, with the catchlight sitting just above the pupils of her eyes.
Using light subtractors in studio photography for complete darkness
We wanted to create an image with complete focus on Meg’s face. Our studio walls are white, so they bounce light from the studio flashes around a little. Although there was no light aimed at the black paper background behind Meg, some ambient light still reached it – so I darkened it completely in post-production.
I also positioned two subtractors just out of shot on either side of Meg. Light subtractors in studio photography are vertical boards to which I peg large sheets of black velvet. This fabric absorbs all the light that reaches it, which is why there’s no fill light reaching the sides of Meg’s cheeks and jaw. Those parts of her face have shadowed to complete black – just like the glamorous Hollywood portraits of Hedy Lamarr and Marlene Dietrich.
Illustration
Camera Settings
- Focal length: 340mm
- Aperture: f/16
- Shutter speed:…