Two more of my articles were published on Digital Photography School this month. This month, I covered some of the various sizes of beauty dish you can get and I wrote a tutorial that covers creating product photography in natural light from start to finish.
What Size Beauty Dish is Right For Your Portrait Photography?
Beauty dishes are fantastical creations. If you like crisp, hard but somehow still soft light with refined edges and deep shadows, they are indispensable. I swear by them and I know a lot of other photographers do as well.
If you’ve ever shopped around for a beauty dish, you will have found that there are many, many options when it comes to size. If you’ve never used one before, how are you supposed to figure out which one would suit you best? Do you go for the biggest one so so that you have the most coverage, or do you go for the smallest for the sake of portability?
The problem is that beauty dishes produce a very specific quality of light that changes drastically when you change the size of the beauty dish. This article compares three common sizes of beauty dish in an attempt to help you figure out which one would best suit you.
Steps For Better Product Photography in Natural Light
This step-by-step tutorial takes you through a process for taking photos of products in natural light. Following this tutorial, you will be able to make minute contrast adjustments, and tame shadows and specular highlights all before you take the final image. When you are photographing products, most of the time, you are photographing large volumes of objects one right after another. Taking steps like the ones I outlined here will ensure that you get your images right in the camera, minimising or negating the need for post processing later. This might be vital in the near future as public attitudes towards any sort of processing grow ever more hostile.
If none of that entices you, maybe the presence of R2-D2 will.
