Glow Silver Softlight Beauty Dish Reflector With Bowens Mount Adapter (20.5")

The Glow 20" Silver Softlight Beauty Dish is a professional level light modifier famous for striking portraiture and fashion images. The unique diffusion properties are achieved using a double reflector system. The final effect has qualities that cross between that of a direct flash and a softbox, giving the image a wraparound look - dreamy like a softbox, but with more contrast anda more dramatic directed beam for a natural feel. The silver finish delivers distinct output, creates contrast and thereby brings out more detail of your subject. The dish mounts onto most brands of studio flash and monolights via speedrings which can be purchased separately.

The 20" Silver version of the series serves best for head and shoulders portraits to dramatic half-figure studies or for subjects that are in tight spaces where softboxes and umbrellas can't do the job.

This pro version of the dish comes with two deflector plates. One acts as the original beauty dish design concept; a small opaque reflective cover suspended directly over the front of the light source, in the center of the beauty dish, preventing direct light from hitting the subject. The light then bounces back off the small interior disk and floods the wall of the larger bowl of the beauty dish, resulting in a broad cast of softer light than obtainable from a standard reflector and much better than the harshness of a speedlight. The second disk is porous, allowing a minute degree of direct but disbursed light to enter the lighting mix for a bit of enhancement. An important feature is the ability to alter the relative position of the mid reflector cap. The distance from the flash tube is adjustable to control the amount of spread to the large bowl and to allow the use of unusually tall or high wattage modeling lights.

The included accessory used with beauty dishes is a diffusion fabric panel called "socks." The sock is a tent of translucent diffusion, with an elastic edge that fits snugly over the rim of the dish. By tempering the ring of focused light that emanates fromthe reflector, the degree of contrast is lowered, resulting in softer edges of shadows. The spread of the light is substantially increased, with a loss of about one stop, with the benefit of beautiful catchlights and natural window light aura. Toning down the silver dish's punch this way, delivers a result similar to a white beauty dish, with a slight increase of exposure.

Photographers use the 20" beauty dish on monolights, flash heads and speedlights for flattering people shots, especially for sculpting facial features and creating beautiful shadows and catchlights. Glamour and sports photographers, which typically use a crisp type of lighting to enhance curves, muscles, and texture, use all sizes of the Glow Beauty Dish. When set in a vertical tower array of two or more, the beauty dish accentuates more of the model's full figure.

The interior of the Glow Beauty Dish comes in two coatings. The silver finish delivers higher output, creates more contrast and brings out more detail than its white counterpart. This pure silver interior version enrichens skin tone and reveals more texture.

All of the beauty dish options add more dimension and tactile sensation to the visual experience.

The optional Glow 30° honeycomb grid is a powerful tool in the arsenal of artificial lighting photographer. By covering the aperture of the reflector with the disk, you gain more control of a light source's beam and feathers the hard light for an attractive shadow.

The effects of the grid's distance to the subject varies the results from broad, with a soft pool of light with slight spill, to a narrow spotlight glow, with more defined borders of shadow falloff, virtually eliminating spill from the rest of the body and the background. This strong directionality can be used to add high key depth for fashion images and emphasize the model facial structureas well as the eyes, lips, nose, and chin.