beauty dishes

david1701

david1701

Suspended / Banned
Messages
10,870
Name
David
Edit My Images
No
one for gary,

how much more efficient is a 50cm beauty dish than a 70cm one and is the light difference amazing?

thinking for sun killing power, theres a £33 cost difference so not earth shattering either way

I like that the 50 is smaller for location work (90% of what it will do)
 
Who's Gary?
Never mind, I'll try to answer:)
If you want the technical answer, the Lencarta 40cm beauty dish outputs 1/10th of a stop more light than it's big brother, but in reality it outputs a lot more than that because it's really all about relative size. To get a similar effect with a different sized light shaper you have to move it closer or further away so that it's the same relative size.
In theory this is fine, but in practice moving a smaller one closer creates a much greater rate of light falloff (Inverse Square Law effect).
And of course, moving the smaller one closer to get a similar effect to the larger one also creates much more effective power, simply because the smaller one will be much closer to the subject.
The Lencarta beauty dishes are 40cm and 70cm not 50cm. If you're thinking about products sold by anyone else, the principles I've set out should apply but will depend on how well they're designed
 
sorry about the sp Garry :D

what I'm thinking is how many stops do I lose with the larger dish (is lencarta kit s fit, if so I'll go have a look at your dishes/heads). As I suspect a beauty dish will be my go to mod as I like the light from a big silver brolly but it'd be nicer in a more sculpted way.

My plan is here I'm not going for the conventional studio approach as for that its cheaper and less aggro to just hire one as I have a mate running a studio for hire

Any comment on either is appreciated as you know your stuff.
 
Yes, all Lencarta flash heads are S-fit.

A beauty dish is MUCH more controlled than a silver brolly, it's designed to produce a hard yet very even light that has no hotspots. I ran a lighting workshop at my studio today for Lencarta and had everyone using a 70cm beauty dish, it's a fantastic tool for the right shape face/complexion and, if a diffuser is fitted to it then basically it becomes a perfectly round softbox.

I've already explained the power situation/light energy delivery - there is no real difference in the amount of light leaving the different-sized beauty dishes but the small one delivers much more light because it has to be positioned much closer to get a similar lighting effect.

Touching on your other thread, you need 600Ws of light to overpower the sun, assuming a 70cm beauty dish at a reasonable distance from the subject, full stop.
This is clear both from my own experience and also from Marc Gouguenheim's article on the Lencarta website (which is a mess at the moment with some photos disappeared and the CSS playing up, which I'm guessing is due to the ongoing website work).
 
epic, 600 was the minimum I've been considering, with you now, I know bigger umbrellas can steal more light than small ones so I though similar happened with dishes. I think I'll go with a 70cm one.

Off to price up a lencarta head, stand and dish
 
The shape of a reflector tends to have more influence on the intensity of the light you get out of it, rather than just the size.

For example, you get more light out of smaller, deeper reflectors because they project quite a narrow pool. For similar reasons, you don't lose nearly as much light out of a well designed deep softbox as you might expect.

Touching on your other thread, photographers using flash outdoors quite often use small/deep reflectors because they are more efficient over distance, and they are a lot less prone to blowing over too. A 70cm beauty dish gives lovely light, but good luck using one of those outdoors on top of a 6ft stand :eek:
 
HoppyUK said:
A 70cm beauty dish gives lovely light, but good luck using one of those outdoors on top of a 6ft stand :eek:
Click to expand...

I've done that a few times, in fact at up to 9' height.
A couple of 10kg weights (carried by assistants of course:)) does the trick nicely
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top