A Thing of Beauty

I was browsing the Internet for tips on setting up a booth for the upcoming Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Bridal Fair and I got sidetracked. Specifically, I got sidetracked onto the idea of studio lighting. Being a budget-conscious person, as any small business owner has to be these days, this led me to DIYPhotography.net and specifically to this post on a do-it-yourself beauty dish.

Now, I am a “do it yourself” kind of person but this is usually limited to design, web site building, and various forms of crafts and needlework. I am not, for instance, the person you would want installing a do-it-yourself electric car conversion in your Prius.

But this looked fun, did not involve any electrical circuits or anything that might break my flash, and could be done with extremely cheap implements that would allow me to mess up and re-do the whole thing a couple of times. So I hit the dollar store, picked up a cheap bowl of the type you put potato chips in for parties, grabbed some little freezer storage containers, a utility knife and some cable ties, and set to work. My first hurdle was that the bowls were the wrong color. The small bowl needed to be opaque and the one I had was all but transparent. This was solved by applying some paint that we inherited from the previous owner of our house. The large bowl was supposed to be painted silver, but it was already a pretty flashy pearly white, so I made no change. The bowl was also of a much more brittle plastic that the one used in the article. It wound up splitting the instant I attacked it with the utility knife. However, I managed to do some damage control on the cutting, though I wound up without any pieces that I could fasten to my flash head with a rubber band. I’m going to try again next week, but for now, I have a pretty decent, if slightly unstable, do-it-yourself beauty dish.

I finished it this morning and went to test it. Unfortunately, neither my husband or my oldest son were in any shape to model for me, one not being a morning person and the other being so much of a morning person that he requires chasing in order to shoot photos. Since I wanted to take at least two pictures, one with the beauty dish and one without, under basically the same conditions, I decided to go with the one person in the house who cannot protest or, indeed, move without my help.

The first photo without the beauty dish shows harsh light on the baby’s face and a harsh, dark shadow behind his head. The light falls off sharply toward the bottom of the photo.

In the second photo, taken with the beauty dish, the light is more even and does not fall off as much toward the bottom of the photo. The shadow is less dense and more diffused with soft edges instead of hard edges, so it is less distracting.

Verdict: The beauty dish works, I had fun, and I am definitely going to try to improve on this lighting technique.

So, if you see me toting around two plastic bowls held together with cable ties, I am not insane. I’m just trying to make everybody look better.

Tomorrow: a professional photo shoot I did using the beauty dish in one of the most beautiful spots in Arkansas!