All about beauty dishes: How to use this reflective light modifier and how to use an umbrella instead

A beauty dish is a popular light modifier. Despite its name, a beauty dish does not make for easy beautiful light. Rather, it requires a lot of skill to use as it does not soften or diffuse light. A beauty dish reflects light, which can be useful when trying to focus light in a particular direction. They are typically used to create a somewhat hard light that doesn’t result in hot spots.

Beauty dishes can be rather pricey, but is it possible to make your own using a less expensive light modifier? As a matter of fact, it is. You can use an umbrella, such as this one, and modify it to deliver almost identical quality of light and catch lights in your subject’s eyes as a beauty dish. To see how to modify it, how to place it and how it stacks up to a real beauty dish, watch the video below.

For more from Joe Edelman, visit his YouTube channel and website.

(Via Fstoppers)