Traditionally, umbrellas are considered to be the lowest end of lighting modifiers, with beauty dishes being one of the more expensive and professional options. However, you might be surprised by how close you can get to the beauty dish look using a small shoot-through umbrella, and this excellent video will show you how.
Coming to you from Daniel Norton with Adorama TV, this fantastic video will show you how to get professional results using just a shoot-through umbrella. No doubt, beauty dishes are a great tool that can produce stunning portraits, but as Norton demonstrates, a small shoot-through umbrella can produce excellent results as well. Of course, the downside of an umbrella will always be that it is far harder to control the spill, whereas a beauty dish allows you to be much more precise with where the light falls (particularly if you add a grid too). That being said, there are often scenarios in which you will not mind or might even prefer the way an umbrella throws the light, and of course, their main benefit is that they are so affordable, particularly compared to a beauty dish. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Norton.
I disagree. To put a diffusor over a beauty dish would be flawed. A beauty dish with diffusion on it is a round softbox, it isn't really a beauty dish anymore. In many cases it may be absolutely the right choice for the image you want to make, but in a comparison like this aiming to specifically compare beauty dish light it is more realistic to use the beauty dish as a beauty dish.
Lee meant the Profoto frosted dome, not a sock over the BD. The recessed heads cannot fill the dish properly, and the dome is helping a little.
Ah, my bad, fair enough. :)
There are a bunch of offbrand BDs that cost under a $100, and while it’s more than a $30 offbrand umbrella, it’s still pretty affordable for most I think.
IMO the big problem in this video is the BD being "about 4 feet away".
What I learned from assisting a couple folks who shoot fashion and beauty is that what makes a BD special is that it has to be very close to the subject (almost in the frame) and feathered off a bit so you are using the penumbra of the light where there is a transition of the light falling off...not just pointing it at the model.
If the BD is used like in the video it is just a large reflector with no BD "magic" That is why the Mola is shaped like it is and why my Norman is more or less a 22 inch reflector marketed as a BD (but it does have the disc to bounce the light back to the reflector).
Sure, you can make BD light and small umbrella light look the same, but that misses the intent of the BD.
The BD is not an easy tool to master and needs a model with great bone structure and great makeup. And a photographer who gets what a BD can do.
I agree, BDs are very difficult to use as a modifier. One of the most common problems people have in my experience is they don't realize how radically feathering can impact a BD. If you feather it too much and the lightsource is no longer blocked by the reflector the BD ceases to act like a BD but if you don't feather it at all it can often look strange. I feel like BDs require more practice than any other lighting modifier.
How did you determine the 2x distance, did you start close and eventually move it further away until you hit your sweet spot?
The guys I knew did the really close in style and I could see that "extra 10%" that made a difference but I could not reliably replicate it :^)
I’ve been trying to up my portrait game and this video, and the comments about it, are very helpful to understanding the process and tools.