The second in a series of experiments where I test how my light modifier interact with the back ground. Specifically, How far do I have to get away from the background with any given lighting modifier, before the background goes black. Last time I used a 60″ umbrella. This time it’s my DIY Beauty Dish. This time I made things a little easier on myself, I skipped the reflector and also started at 1′ away and progressed by steps of 2′ rather than 1.5′. Just easier on my brain that way. This makes it a bit less scientific of an experiment, but this isn’t science, this is art. I don’t need exact, I need a general idea of how far I need to be away from the background to achieve the look I’m going for.
For completeness sake, I include my setup info again:
- Nikon d300s with a 50mm 1.8 lens
- 1 Vivitar 285hv in an 18″ beauty dish
- Shutter speed: 1/250th @ f/5.6 (increased the f/stop to get some sharper images to ease the burden on your already taxed eyeballs, it isn’t easy looking at my ugly mug, much less a blurry ugly mug).
- The beauty dish was about arms length away from my face the whole time and feathered just slightly to my right.
You can see that at 19′, I haven’t quite gone black yet – it looked all black in the the viewfinder. If I’d have gone to about 22′ I’d have gotten full-on black. This really surprised me, I expected to hit black a lot sooner with the Beauty Dish than that. I think, looking back, the Beauty Dish goes darker a bit sooner than the umbrella, but the fall-off slows at about the same time as the umbrella so that I hit black at just about the same distance as the umbrella.
Next up: I’ll slap a grid onto my SB-600. I’ve got 2 sizes to try out. Looking forward to it.