DIY Beauty Dish

After playing with Jason’s Beauty Dish earlier this week (as used in my weekly shot for this week) I decided I wanted one for myself to mess with.  Two problems though: for one, they don’t really make a beauty dish for speedlights (I don’t have any studio strobes, yet…), and two, they are pretty expensive.  After some quick googling I found several do-it-yourself versions ranging from using a turkey pan all the way up to full-blown build-it-from scratch ideas.  I decided to go with a more “high-end” version based off of the following guides:

• Beauty Dish for SB-800 – David Tejada “The F-stops Here”
• New Beauty Dish Adapter for SB-800 Speedlight - Jon C. Haverstick PHOTOGRAPHY
• Building a DIY beauty dish – LightandPixels

I don’t have a step-by-step tutorial since the ones I listed above do a much better job explaining than I could, so check them out if you want to make one for yourself.

Here are a few shots after it is mostly finished.  I still need to make the light stand mounting bracket and it will be done.

And here is a quick shot of my using this as the only light modifier.  It was shot at f/8 and 1/4 power, so the light loss isn’t too bad.

Not too bad.  It has a not-hard, not-soft quality to it, much similar to the Lumiquest Softbox III, only on a larger scale.  I’ll have to play around with it some more and see what I think.  One thing I’d like to change is maybe getting a shallower bowl to use for another version.  I’ll keep everyone posted if I did end up doing that.

Let me know what you think!