We recently got our hands on the new MagMod Beauty Dish. As you might expect, MagMod designed the Beauty Dish to be super portable, extremely easy to use, and highly effective at modifying light for portraits. We gave it a test drive to walk you through a simple two-light setup for creating editorial, black and white inspired portraits, like those you might find in Vogue or a similar editorial magazine.
Let’s get into it.
Video: How to Use the MagMod Beauty Dish for Editorial Portraits
Gear Overview
Here’s a list of the gear we used, including a breakdown of everything that’s included in the new MagMod Beauty Dish Pro Kit.
- MagMod Beauty Dish Pro Kit
- Beauty Dish with a Bowens Mount (Profoto mount sold separately)
- Grid
- Sock Diffuser
- Profoto B10X Plus
- Profoto A10 on a MagMod MagShoe 2
- White Satin Umbrella
Like always, you can use any light source and modifiers that you have access to. Apply the principles covered below and make it all work with the gear you have.
1. Get to Know the Beauty Dish
To help give you a feel for how this beauty dish is going to affect the image, we’ll start with just the main light source and the beauty dish, and then we’ll make other adjustments.
The way we position the light in relation to our subject will also impact the outcome, so keep that in mind. For this demonstration, we’ve placed the light toward the right side, with the light angled slightly down, so that the light falls on our subject’s face with a little light landing on the body as well. You can always place your main light wherever you’d like. We chose this setup to create something a bit more dramatic.
One other thing worth mentioning is our subject’s wardrobe, which we planned in advance to help create the editorial look we’re going for.
One Light with an Open Beauty Dish
Notice how the beauty dish gives the light an entirely spherical shape. You can see it in the way that the light is hitting the ground, background, and everything. Another notable characteristic of the beauty dish is the specular light quality, which retains its reflective qualities and creates more contrast. This is one of the key differences between the beauty dish versus a softbox, in addition to the shape of the modifier and the amount of light control it gives us.
One Light with a Gridded Beauty Dish
Now, we’re going to add a grid to the beauty dish. MagMod’s magnetic system makes it super easy to add the grid to the beauty dish. The grid will give us more light control and help prevent the light from spilling onto the background. That’s not to say there is zero light falloff in this process. Anytime that you use a grid you are going to lose a little bit of light, maybe around one stop or so of brightness. Of course, you can make up for this by adjusting your light power or in-camera exposure settings.
In reviewing the photo, we can see how the grid funnels the light right towards our subject. Her face is roughly the same as the previous shot in regard to brightness, but look at the difference (between the images below) in terms of light control between the open beauty dish versus the dish with the grid added.
The grid fits tightly over the beauty dish and the small notches increase the light control compared to the egg crate style grids used with softboxes.
One Light with Grid + Sock Diffuser
Now, let’s go ahead and put the sock (for diffusion) over the grid. You can do this a couple different ways, placing the sock over the grid or the grid over the sock. We prefer using the beauty dish with the sock over the grid to give ourselves one layer of diffusion. With the added modifier, we’re going to lose a bit more light (in this case, about two stops of light), but again, we can adjust for that by bumping the flash power or changing our in-camera exposure settings.
As you can see, with the sock over the beauty dish, the edges around the highlight to shadow transitions get much softer. Here’s a look at all three shots, including the beauty dish by itself, with the grid added, and with both a grid and a sock diffuser.
It’s easy to see just how dramatic of a difference there is between each of these shots. When we combine the beauty dish with the grid and diffuser sock, we get beautiful light control. However you decide to use the beauty dish, just make sure that the light quality matches the subject in the story that you’re telling.
Additional Light Source for Fill Light
Often, photographers tend to set up one light in the studio and call it a day. While the photo looks nice with just one light, we’ve lost a lot of detail in the shadows and there’s not a lot of depth and dimension to the photo. Instead, we recommend adding another light source to serve as a general fill light in a scene. In fact, we generally set this light up before adding and dialing in our main light.
What you’re looking at in the image above is a Profoto A1 boomed up on a C-Stand with an umbrella. We’ve placed the light high up to better simulate natural light when the flash fires. The flash will fire through the umbrella and bounce light back across the studio, providing fill light and keeping some details in the shadows. It’s worth noting that the umbrella wouldn’t be necessary if the ceiling were white.
When we’re doing this in a studio, we’re really sort of mirroring shooting outdoors. Outside, the sun provides a ready-to-go fill light. We want to do the same thing when we set up a basic light source to give the scene some shadows and some depth.
Light Comparison
To better illustrate the impact of the different lights, we’ll showcase the results from various stages of the setup for context.
This is what we’d see if no flashes were firing. It’s mostly blacked out.
Next, we can see how it looks with just the fill light added. Here’s a look at some different options:
There’s some subjectiveness in terms of how bright you want the fill light to be, but it is important to remember that this is a fill light, so you likely don’t want it to be as bright as the main light. You want just enough detail in the shadows so that they’re not blacked out.
Finally, we can add our main light.
Adding a V-Flat
We can add a V-Flat to bring more light from the left side of the frame.
For this setup, we’ve positioned the V-Flat off to the side, just behind our subject. With the V-Flat added, you can drop the fill light power (from overhead) just a bit and get a nice balance of both.
Now, the shadows are nice and dark, but we’ve managed to retain some detail in them.
Bonus Tip: Adjust Light Position as Needed
There are a number of things to pay attention to when setting up your lights and working through a session to capture a variety of images. Whether your subject is standing, sitting, or even squatting, remember to adjust the height of that main light to compensate. If the subject is down low, for example, and the light’s coming from too high above, we’re going to get dark shadows around the eyes. If the light source is too low, we’ll get campfire lighting.
Conclusion + Final Shots
We hope you found this tutorial on creating editorial portraits with the MagMod Beauty Dish helpful. The final setup we used here renders a more polished look with a good balance between highlights and shadows, which, at the end of the day, really sets apart refined vs unrefined lighting setups.
That said, here’s a look at some of our final shots using the MagMod Beauty Dish.
