Glow - 17" Silver Beauty Dish for Elimchrom Mount

The Glow 17" Silver Beauty Dish for Elimchrom is a light modifier famous for striking portraiture and fashion images. The unique diffusion properties are achieved using a double parabolic reflector system. The final effect has qualities that cross between that of a direct flash and a softbox, giving the image a wrap around look - like a softbox, but with more contrast and a more dramatic directed beam. The silver finish delivers higher output, creates more contrast and brings out more detail of your subject. The dish mounts onto most brands of studio flash and monolights via speedrings which are purchased separately. The 17" Silver version of the series serves best for head and shoulders portraits to dramatic figure studies or for subjects that are in tight spaces where softboxes and umbrellas can't do the job. The beauty dish design has 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 backwards off the small interior disk and floods the wall of the larger bowl of the beauty dish, resulting in a wide cast of softer light than obtainable from a standard reflector and much better than the harshness of a speedlight. The position of the small center reflector cap is adjustable to control the amount of spread to the large bowl and to allow the use of tall or high wattage modeling lights. The included accessory used with beauty dishes is a diffusion fabric panel called "socks." This is a circle of translucent diffusion, with an elastic edge that fits snugly over the rim of the dish. By softening the ring of focused light that emanates from the reflector, the degree of contrast is lowered and edges of shadows are softer. The spread of light is greatly increased, with a loss of about 1 stop, with beautiful catch lights and natural window light aura. Photographers use 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. 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. The bigger 28" diameter model can produce a beam with more 'reach', overall scattering more focused light to treat larger subjects and areas as well. Used in a vertical tower array of 2 or more, the beauty dish accentuates a 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. The pure white interior version minimizes hot spots, smoothes skin tone and reveals less texture. All of the beauty dish options, in size and finish, add more dimension and tactile sensation to the visual experience. The optional Glow 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 varying degrees of the grid varies the effect from the broad 40 degree with a soft pool of light with little spill, to a narrow 20 degree 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 emphasis the model facial structure as well as the eyes, lips, nose and chin.