The Ugly Box
So the boss was out the other night and I was at home kind of bored, looking around on the net for the largest beauty dish available for a hot shoe flash to no avail. I then came across a forum post where someone said you could get similar light to a beauty dish if you take the external baffle off a 24″ softbox. I was a bit mystified as to exactly how that would create light similar to a beauty dish, because it seems to me that the signature light from a beauty dish is still relatively hard light with fast falloff and a pretty catchlight that looks like a ring.
Inspired nonetheless, I proceeded by cutting up a cereal box into a large (12″) circle about the size of the internal diffuser, sticking foil on it, then sticking the circle inside the diffuser. The plan was for it to block and reflect the light being fired into the box and reflect it into the silver lining of the softbox. I hooked up the flash and took a test shot:
It kind of worked, although there are a few immediate flaws with this ‘design’. First, a bunch of light leaks out of the back. Not much of a problem, a black tshirt thrown over the back of the flash head would sort that out. Second, it’s pretty ugly. So I took the circle out and covered the back of it in black paper to make it look a bit less like a 3 year old had made it. I fired it up again and started snapping away at myself:
Excuse the goofy look, that’s just my self portrait face. You can see that the quality of light is actually not far off what you might expect from a beauty dish: a nice quick falloff with a bright and targeted hot spot of light to illuminate the subject. Here’s another:
Not bad for 10 minutes work… in fact I liked the result so much that I decided to use it on the shoot I did yesterday for UK drum n bass group The Burbs, pictures and writeup of which will be on here shortly.
