Under the umbrella of professional photography equipment, the Glow 17" White Beauty Dish for Flashpoint stands out as a renowned light modifier, celebrated for its ability to produce striking portraiture and fashion images. This unique tool utilizes a double parabolic reflector system to achieve its distinctive diffusion properties. The resulting effect is a harmonious blend of a direct flash and a softbox, delivering an image with a wrap-around look. It's akin to a softbox but offers more contrast and a more dramatic directed beam. The white finish of the beauty dish enhances soft output, amplifies contrast, and accentuates the intricate details of your subject.
This 17" White Beauty Dish is designed to mount onto most brands of studio flash and monolights via speedrings, which are sold separately. It is particularly effective for head and shoulders portraits, dramatic figure studies, or subjects in tight spaces where softboxes and umbrellas may not be as effective. The design of the beauty dish includes a small opaque reflective cover suspended directly over the front of the light source. This prevents direct light from hitting the subject, instead bouncing the light backwards off the small interior disk and flooding the larger bowl of the beauty dish.
The result is a wider cast of softer light than a standard reflector can provide, and significantly softer than the harshness of a speedlight. The position of the small center reflector cap is adjustable, allowing you to control the spread to the large bowl and accommodate tall or high wattage modeling lights. The beauty dish also includes a diffusion fabric panel, commonly known as "socks. " This translucent diffusion circle fits snugly over the rim of the dish, softening the ring of focused light, lowering contrast, and softening shadow edges.
Photographers often use the 17" to 22" beauty dish on monolights, flash heads, and speedlights for flattering people shots. It's especially effective for sculpting facial features, creating beautiful shadows, and producing captivating catch lights. The Glow Beauty Dish is a favorite among glamour and sports photographers, who use it to create crisp lighting that enhances curves, muscles, and texture. The larger 28" diameter model can produce a beam with more 'reach', scattering more focused light to treat larger subjects and areas. The interior of the Glow Beauty Dish is available in two coatings.
The silver finish delivers higher output, creates more contrast, and brings out more detail, while the pure white interior version minimizes hot spots, smoothes skin tone, and reveals less texture. The optional Glow honeycomb grid is a powerful addition to any artificial lighting photographer's toolkit. By covering the aperture of the reflector with the disk, you gain more control of a light source's beam and can feather the hard light for an attractive shadow. The varying degrees of the grid can create effects ranging from a broad 40-degree soft pool of light with little spill, to a narrow 20-degree spotlight glow with more defined borders of shadow falloff.
In summary, the Glow 17" White Beauty Dish for Flashpoint is a versatile and essential tool for photographers aiming to create visually stunning and professional-quality images.