Beauty Dish vs. Gridded Softbox Cage Match!!


Battle of the diffusers!


So I've been very curious about beauty dishes lately and out of nowhere Jess goes "I have 2 in my car!". I promptly set up a cage match. In one corner, JTl everlights with gridded softbox, in the other alien bees 400 with beauty dish. What I really should have done is used the same light source and changed only the diffuser for it to be fair. I didn't think of that till later. I've read that continuos light is creamier than strobes and I'll test that some other day. Really what I wanted to see was if I just had to have a beauty dish, to see if it did something my gridded softbox did not. Beauty dishes supposedly have a slightly brighter center which is good for portraits. These shots are at the same aperture and jpegs right out of the camera (no post). These are not how I light normally, but I kept it to one light to see more clearly how each light works. Jamie was very gracious in sitting for me and her boyfriend Will sat for me too since he's almost as beautiful. In the above shot, Jamie is lit with the gridded softbox. In the shot below she's lit with a beauty dish. As you can see, besides the color temp difference, they're very similar. The light is both directional and diffuse for both. They're both flattering portrait lights. In the end I declared the gridded softbox the winner because it was just the tiniest bit smoother on the skin. Either one works though and would have different applications for different things. Incidentally, the JTLs are pretty much crap lights, (we blew 2 fuses and 3 bulbs on 2 shoots) while the alien bees are pretty good value for the money. If you want what the pros use, it's called... wait for it... profoto...

Posted: Fri - August 4, 2006 at 02:02 AM          

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