Photo Friday: Shooting Under a Beauty Dish

Last weekend, I attended another model photo shoot, working with low lighting to capture dramatic contrasts. It was the first time that I used a beauty dish.

A beauty dish is a parabolic reflector lamp that focuses the light to a single point. This means that you can have a subject in a dark setting and the light will only fall on your subject, as long as the dish is not pointed towards the backdrop.

For this shoot, we suspended the beauty dish directly above our model so that the light would fall straight down. Our model stood in front of a black background, allowing us to create a stark contrast of light and dark.

The following shot was taken with a single beauty dish and no other lighting. I shot at 1/100 of a second at f/8 and ISO 200. The focal length was 70mm.

Post-production work was performed by using PaintShop Pro X4.

What do you think? You can see more photos from this shoot on my Flickr page.

Happy Friday!