|
Forums >
Photography Talk >
BLACK Beauty Dish (yes, it's black inside...)
With the time that I've spent evaluating and testing light modifier designs (some of which never make it to market), I honestly was starting to think that I couldn't really be surprised in this area. I was SOO wrong! Introducing the "Black Beauty Dish": https://theblackdish.com/ Yes, I have some observations, but I'll let those who are curious check it out first... Sep 18 22 01:46 pm Link I'm going to wait for empirical results. From my limited understanding of light, however, all I see is something that requires a LOT more power and doesn't offer any additional benefit. Sep 18 22 03:02 pm Link and all this time, I had been under the impression that black surfaces absorbed more light than they reflected. Silly me! Sep 18 22 05:53 pm Link My impression is the it doesn’t do what it promises and that the same effect can be achieved by numerous other products in the market. Sep 18 22 06:51 pm Link Yeah, I think that everyone is in agreement. He frequently confuses "softness" (the relative size of the light) with "specularity" (the high contrast hot spots, etc). But when push comes to pull, he suggests that the black surface reduces the specularity of the beauty dish. When you put two diffusers in the softbox, any possible specularity advantage is gone. You just have a plain beauty dish softbox that, as has been pointed out above (black deflector and black interior material), is far less efficient with the light. So using this design with diffusers, simply makes no sense whatsoever. Now as far as the idea that the black reduces the specularity (IF you used it without diffusers). My personal suspicion is that his reasoning went something like this. A silver interior (without diffusers) is MORE specular than a white interior that reflects less light. So therefore (he might think) that black, with a significantly lower reflectivity again, would be far less specular. I am NOT backing this theory, if that's what it is. To test it, you would have to have two identical beauty dishes, one white (definitely not silver) and one black. On the black one you'd need to crank the power up to get the same amount of output light and then compare the RAW file specularity, side by side. If he has done such a (solid) comparison test, he hasn't done a good job of communicating that. I can admire his attempt to think outside of the box. That's often how progress is made. But I really hope that he did some kind of test (such as I described), BEFORE investing any serious money into this venture. And even if the black material is less specular than white (with the light cranked up to make up for the light loss), is there really any demand for a far less light efficient beauty dish style softbox? Sep 18 22 06:52 pm Link Perhaps you don't use a light with it? Put it close to one side of the head while doing head and shoulders portraiture and absorb the light so it doesn't bounce on that side, creating shadows. He has an all white room and needs to make light go away? I dunno, just tossing it out there. Seems like you could just buy some flat black rattle can and spray a crappy white beauty dish black, if you really had to be up on the "latest absurd nonsense":. Sep 18 22 08:00 pm Link I used a beauty dish that was white inside - that did a really good job of eliminating hot spots. This sounds like the invention of someone who doesn’t understand light. It’s not even a beauty dish :-) Sep 18 22 09:52 pm Link It's a joke.  Sep 18 22 10:03 pm Link LightDreams wrote: Yeah, he is claiming something that is not backed up by common understanding of the way that light works. When using the diffusion w/ black interior the effect would be soft light like a soft box, but reduced spread like using barn doors or egg crate grid. That's it, no big whoop. It seems like using it without the diffuser is roughly the same as using a bare head or a Profoto Hardbox. I guess you could say that it's cheaper than a Hardbox though more expensive than just using a bare head. Sep 19 22 04:03 am Link Maybe it's for infra red photography? All joking aside, I would need to see a side by side comparison, white, silver, black before I am convinced. The samples on his website appear to be done with the white baffle inserted which just creates a small round soft box. Sep 19 22 07:33 am Link Shadow Dancer wrote: that's called a flag Sep 19 22 07:58 am Link goofus wrote: Yes, I know that. Don't tell me I goofed Goofus? lol... Sep 19 22 08:16 am Link goofus wrote: Yes, I know that. Don't tell me I goofed Goofus? lol... Sep 19 22 08:16 am Link Dan Howell wrote: I came to a similar conclusion. I had no doubt that he didn't fully understand some of the lighting basics. For example, his constant confusion between "softness" and "specularity", his claims that 40" is the "perfect" softbox size (instead of different sizes for different purposes), and his claims the black material used "allows for the light to be absorb AND reflected", etc. Some of his statements about light are really "out there". Sep 19 22 09:05 am Link LightDreams wrote: Yeah, the more I look at the video and the comments he has replied to the more I'm calling utter bullshit on the device. I am pretty sure that anyone with strong fundamentals of lighting could demonstrate the glaring errors of his pitch and reproduce that lighting effect with three or four different approaches. I'm still left wondering if he just doesn't know or just doesn't care about the veracity of the video. Sep 19 22 10:13 am Link It's a product designed by a group of strobe manufacturers to increase sales of replacement strobes and additional batteries due to shooting at max power all the time to get anything useable. Sep 20 22 05:01 am Link After having an exchange with him on Youtube comments I think I understand better what he is attempting. It appears that the Black Beauty dish (essentially a medium depth umbrella with light element in the center) has a black cone/dish that interrupts the direct light of the strobe tube or Pyrex depending on brand. Other beauty dishes, both white and silver have this element. My collapsable Chimera (a company that I would trust a ton more about lighting modification than his) has a flexible 'interrupter' to take out the hot spot. I believe his point is that only light from essentially the sides of the strobe tube will reflect off his black umbrella sides and then pass through the diffusion element and onto the subject. The problem with his, i guess you would call it theory, is that he doesn't take into account the light physics rule of the inverse square law about light decay over distance (even the difference between 2" and 20" angle/edges of reflectance of the umbrella) negates his idea that the black walls somehow send softer light through the diffusion panel. Secondly, it has been my experience and that of anyone who plays with lighting modification that the final surface between the light and the subject has the greatest effect on the quality, ie. the diffusion panel. He gets turned around when he talks about power and intensity, when I think he is seeing that putting a light element closer to the subject creates softer light. But he fails to deal with the contrast and fall off (inverse sq law here too) of light as you move closer. I'm still not sure, in fact I doubt seriously, if the black walls would reflect the light any more broadly/smoothly than white walls. I guess you could make an argument that silver walls would be more spectral if you don't use the diffusion panel relative to white, but that argument gets sticky when you put on the diffusion panel. I would say in his case the black (fabric) walls are essentially the same as white walls but less efficient. Interestingly, I use Plume Wafer soft boxes which were designed by Gary Register, the guy who designed the original Chimera soft box. In the Wafer, he uses a combination of specifically placed white and dimpled silver sections to more evenly spread the light over the front face of the diffusion. When used as designed, the Wafer will produce even softness and power over the whole face of the box at about half of the depth of a Chimera soft box which uses distance (again inverse sq. law) to achieve surface evenness. Honestly, if he had come up with a different tool for doing video, or software, or any number of other areas of photography I wouldn't have dug in as much as I have with this. I consider myself a lighting-oriented photographer whereas other photographers are more interested in motion or color or any number of other elements. I have always been about light effects and getting into the weeds about specific lighting. Sep 20 22 11:04 am Link Dan Howell wrote: Definitely. Especially as we're not dealing with a pure black "absence of light". We're effectively just dealing with a darker / reduced light output version of (diffused) white. Sep 20 22 12:56 pm Link This is a joke right? If it isn't, this shill doesn't understand light at all. As P.T. Barnum once said "there's a sucker bourn every minute". Sep 24 22 01:42 pm Link Storytelling-Images wrote: +1 Sep 24 22 05:37 pm Link Frozen Instant Imagery wrote: Sep 24 22 11:34 pm Link I have used a lot of light modifiers and a black beauty dish sounds rather odd. I use black to remove or balance out other lights. Sep 24 22 11:41 pm Link This seems crazy. If you used it with even a moderately powerful studio flash it would surely burst into flames. See also Ascor flash systems. Capable of igniting newspaper a few feet away with up to 48,000 Joules through a single flash head. Sep 25 22 06:51 am Link He managed to become a Sony Artisan according to his profile on the site. I couldn't find anything of him placing it with other well-known photographers for their review, which is pretty standard for a new product. His photography looks not very good and yet he is confident. He needs something different as he can't shoot well. I saw bad highlights as he when He shoots with the "Black Dish". I don't use flexible and collapsible beauty dishes for shooting beauty. The price of a good beauty dish, which I am happy to recommend a few is about 1/3rd to 2/5ths of his price gouging "patent in process" unnecessary addition to the modifier world. Sep 25 22 09:18 am Link Warren Leimbach wrote: Sep 25 22 04:52 pm Link I honestly thought this was a joke posting and video. The maker knows little about light. Black surfaces do not reflect, diffuse or focus light. They absorb light. Black surfaces are desired when flagging or controlling light. You want a black grid to better control the direction and spread of light on a gridded soft box or dish. The design of a beauty dish is to bounce the light off the internal disc and spread it around the bowl to be a little more directional than hard light with a bit of softness as it bounces off the dish to the subject. If the interior is white the light will be softer and more diffused. Silver dishes have slightly higher output with more directional punchier light. Painting the dish black basically renders the dish nearly useless. With the lights on high power minimal light might be reflected but it makes more sense and one has more control by powering your strobe down. The claims about the dish in the video are ridiculous. Also, you do not want to put a black synthetic fabric or black anything close to a flashtube. Once I got a black speck embedded in the clear plastic fresnel of a speed light. Where the mere 74 watt flash would pass through the clear plastic, at close range the black speck absorbed the flash, heated and melted the surrounding plastic which would darken and then that would absorb light. After a while that tiny speck became a large melted spot on the lens. Fire a monolight close to a black plastic bag and watch it melt (rhetorically, do not do it or the vaporized plastic could condense on the flashtube and damage it) Sep 30 22 07:23 am Link Also odd that he is claiming that (all) beauty dishes have harsh highlights. Granted there are big differences amongst manufacturers and whether it has a white or silver interior. I bought my Mola’s specifically because they create beautiful “pearly” highlights. Beauty dishes are my go to studio modifier when I want elegant fall off and beautiful highlights. Sep 30 22 07:40 am Link  +1 for a (non-black) beauty dish as a go to modifier… This a white dish and a soft box fill. I don’t seem to be troubled by “hot spots” from a properly wielded beauty dish Oct 05 22 07:37 pm Link |
