A beauty dish really does do something quite wonderful with skin, eyes and dimensionality. This photo is a shot of Annie Drury, a very talented singer / songwriter with a very haunting and beautiful voice from Haworth, in Yorkshire. There has been no retouching of her eyes in this shot and the dish has somehow extracted light, colour and vitality. A beauty dish is also very portable – much more so than lugging around a softbox or god forbid attempting to put one together on location.
Another positive side effect is wind! Pardon? Excuse me…We do a lot of location photography on the Berwickshire coast which is rugged and beautiful, however it does tend to be a little windy on occasion and a beauty dish is pretty wind resistant when compared to a softbox and especially an umbrella. I’ve destroyed three umbrella’s in the last year whereas the beauty dish doesn’t catch the wind as much and if it does fall over, can be bent back into shape. If you buy only one light modifier – make it a beauty dish. But if you pair it with a reflector and 30 degree grid, now you’re really talking.
80:8 Moving | Still | Blog 