How to shoot dramatic portraits using a beauty dish with Joel Grimes
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A beauty dish is one of the essential modifiers that every photographer should have in the arsenal. According to photographer Joel Grimes from Westcott Lighting, the most dramatic effect that can be achieved with the beauty dish is who you either have the light going from top to bottom of from the side to side. These are the best, most beautiful lighting scenarios on the planet.
Today we will be exploring the top-bottom setup.
Top Down Beauty Dish
In the first set up, Joel has the 24″ beauty dish right above the model, top down. That way any shadow from eyes, nose, chin, lips will go straight down. The length of the shadow can be adjusted by either bringing the light up or down.
The background is black, which in the shot will turn grey since so much light hits it from the short distance.
His camera is at the shutter speed 1/250, F stop 7.1 – the sharpest f stop on his 24-70 1.8 V2 lens. ISO is 100.
In this example Joel is shooting with a rather wide angle (24-28mm), which is uncommon for the portrait photography. When shooting wide, the model’s hands in this example get bigger due to lens distortion – the kind of effect that the photographer is after.
The first step is to get the exposure right. Since Joel wants to keep his camera lens at the sharpest F stop, he decides to change the intensity of the light instead to get proper exposure.
If you feel like you would want to add a bit more drama to the picture, try raising the light a few inches and turning the strobe head a bit downwards.
Beauty dish + 2 edge lights
In this setup we are adding two edge lights on each side of the model. The goal is to create a sharp edge on the model’s face.
We will start out with both lights being on equal distance and equal power. And then we will adjust the power level on the main light to bring more drama into the photo.
To bring more drama into the photo you would need to find a proper balance between the center of the model’s face and sides. If the center is too lit, the image turns flat. If the center is too dark, you might loose the details.
Watch the full tutorial video of Joel Grimes for Westcott Lighting here: