Glow 17" Silver Beauty Dish for Balcar White Lighting & Alien Bees

An exceptional tool for professional photographers, the Glow 17" Silver Beauty Dish for Balcar White Lighting & Alien Bees is renowned for its ability to produce striking portraiture and fashion imagery. This light modifier's unique diffusion properties are achieved through a double parabolic reflector system, creating a blend of direct flash and softbox effects. The result is an image with a wrap-around look, similar to a softbox, but with enhanced contrast and a more dramatic, directed beam. The silver finish of the beauty dish amplifies output, enhances contrast, and accentuates the details of your subject, making it an ideal choice for photographers seeking to capture intricate details.

Designed to mount onto most brands of studio flash and monolights, the beauty dish requires separate speedrings for attachment. The 17" Silver version is particularly effective for head and shoulder portraits, dramatic figure studies, or subjects in tight spaces where traditional softboxes and umbrellas may not be suitable. The beauty dish features a small opaque reflective cover suspended directly over the light source, preventing direct light from reaching the subject. Instead, the light bounces off the small interior disk and floods the larger bowl of the beauty dish, producing a softer, wider cast of light than a standard reflector and significantly reducing the harshness of a speedlight.

The position of the small center reflector cap can be adjusted to control the spread of light to the large bowl and accommodate tall or high wattage modeling lights. Included with the beauty dish is 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, reducing contrast, and softening shadow edges. Photographers often use the 17" to 22" beauty dish on monolights, flash heads, and speedlights for flattering people shots, especially for sculpting facial features and creating beautiful shadows and catch lights.

The Glow Beauty Dish is a favorite among glamour and sports photographers, who use it to enhance curves, muscles, and texture. The optional Glow honeycomb grid is a valuable addition to any photographer's toolkit. By covering the reflector's aperture with the disk, you gain greater control over the light source's beam, feathering the hard light for an attractive shadow. The varying degrees of the grid can alter the effect from a broad 40-degree soft pool of light with little spill, to a narrow 20-degree spotlight glow with more defined shadow borders.

In summary, the Glow 17" Silver Beauty Dish for Balcar White Lighting & Alien Bees is a versatile, high-quality light modifier that can enhance your photography by adding more dimension and tactile sensation to the visual experience.