Beauty Dish Contrast

First, the client bought me dinner so we could talk about our relationship and discuss his needs for the photo shoot to follow. It was my second free meal of the day with the first being fried catfish and green beans with sweet tea. The evening meal was chicken parmigiana with cheese ravioli and red sauce.

The assignment to follow the last meal was to shoot a set of photos of mixed martial artists for banners to be displayed at the entrance to the event venue and some advertising information before the event in several weeks.

The shoot was set for one of the fighter’s local training gyms where I’d planned to build a small studio with strong rim lighting, a softbox fill light above the camera and a directional light across the background and a spotted hair light to create depth.

The background would be a found location in the gym perhaps lockers, chain fencing for the ring or a wall with graffiti or rough paint.

My plans fell apart within several minutes after my arrival. The gym was packed with fighters training, sparring and occupying almost every square foot of the training space. There was little, if any space to build even a studio, even with my SB800s and lightweight stands.

Another problem I encountered, and somewhat anticipated, the fighters were there to train and wanted little to do with sitting for a protracted shooting session as I worked them into position and attitude for good photography. Most had been photographed before but not by a pro shooter who wanted more of their time than quickly standing with a fighting pose for a quick frame or two of on-camera flash.

As luck would have it, two of the walls in the front training room were lined with red cushioning pads similar to the pads beneath the basket of a middle school gym where I’d photographed a team. I’d used the slightly reflective background before and knew what results I’d get by throwing a strobe on it.

I wasn’t going to be able to set up light stands on the padded floor. I didn’t have a lot of time and the space was occupied with about 12 fighters running through exercises and practicing submission techniques. Their motions took them through the spaces where light stand would have stood. I had to change my plans from four or five lights to one.

Although I’d planned to use a small softbox for the front light in my previous lighting plan, I’d brought along a Lumodi Beauty Dish to substitute if my internal muse disliked the softer light.

The softbox light would have been good for front lighting with strong rim light striking the sides of the fighter’s heads defining their shape and separating them from the background. Using a softbox as a single light source might have worked on some models but not fighters with a days growth of beard, sweat, and attitude.

The Lumodi Beauty Dish, a recent purchase and used just enough to be comfortable with its use, was the perfect choice.

Its light was stronger than the softbox but not as contrasty as a bare strobe. I wanted to create contrast on facial features with a directional light. the beauty dish was a good choice I also had access to a small ring light but sometime think it is overused. The beauty dish was a good choice for this situation.

I used a human light stand to position the beauty dish directly over my head almost as if it was a tall strobe attached to the camera. The fighter’s were places as close to the background as possible so light falloff from the strobe would be minimum.

I used Nikon Creative Lighting System to determine the exposure because I was constantly changing my position to the subject for to shoot a full length to a tighter head shot. The light, attached to a HLS, was always being moved closer or further from the subject. Shooting ion manual with a single f-stop and constant strobe output would have slowed the process. I would have to stop between each setup and adjust either my f-stop or the output of the strobe to compensate for its changed position.

The beauty dish created just enough directional lighting to highlight each fighter’s facial features and a shadow that was soft enough to keep some detail to help create depth.

The camera was set to manual exposure, 1/320th, f5.6, RAW.

I worked through 7 fighters in 14 minutes with individual poses and several poses facing another fighter.

Post processing included multiple layers of RAW image smart object processing and masking, increased clarity with the Topaz 4 Photoshop plug-in, and High Pass filter for sharpening with masking so it only applied to certain portions of the fighter’s face.