In this video I'm gonna be reviewing the new Profoto OCF beauty dishes as well
as give you a firsthand look into how we shot and lit our recent James Dean
inspired wedding photo shoot.
What's up everybody? My name is Pye Jirsa of Lin & Jirsa photography and SLR Lounge.
In this video we're talking about the new OCF Beauty Dishes for which we have two.
We have the silver and we have the white. Both of these beauty dish modifiers fit
into a tiny bag. They weigh less than a pound and they can be tucked virtually
anywhere in your gear bag. The portability and ease of use is
incredible but what's even more fantastic is the price point. These
beauty dishes come in at around $180. Let's talk about the shoot
and the images. Now this was a personal shoot and for it I wanted to see just
how much quality I could squeeze out of my newly acquired Canon 5DS as well as
my new Zeiss Otus 55mm and 85mm lenses which are arguably the
standard in still photography primes. Usually when I'm shooting wide open
apertures in the middle of the day I like to use ND filters over my lenses
because they help me to bring down the amount of light and stay below the 1/200
of a second sync speed to get the most power out of my flash systems.
But for this shoot I knew that if I were to use a ND filter it would
automatically compromise the quality of the images that I'm getting out of the
Zeiss Otus lenses right from the start
regardless of the quality of ND filter that I use. This is where the Profoto B1
and B2 really shine because running in high-speed sync we can still get
significantly more power out of these strobes then comparing it to regular
flashes running high speed sync. In fact, we use the B2 on this shoot in
at 250 Ws. In high-speed sync you're gonna be still getting four to five
times the amount of power than a standard flash running high speed sync.
For the light modifier I often use the silver beauty dish simply because we're
shooting in such a bright scene and the silver is gonna get me a little bit more
light intensity. For the shoot the lighting is actually fairly simple. We
place our subjects backs, for the most part, against the sun. So we're using the
sun as basically a backlight or a rim light for the entire scene. Inside of the
frame I'm composing my frame with the subject that's placed over the slightly
darker background of the mountains. This is what makes that edge light
really pop against the darker surface of the mountain. From there we add the B2 along with the
silver beauty dish and we light the subject at a pretty dramatic angle. What
we're trying to do is create and nice dimension and direction to that main
light. We want to control the light pattern by simply moving the subjects
face and body position to get the right light pattern onto the person. Also, at
that point, while using the B2 as our main light, we can use the ambient exposure
in the camera to also control the fill that's coming into the shadows on the
other side of the person's face. Keep in mind that I want these images to have kind
of that bright and airy wedding-esque feel so I chose an ambient exposure setting that
would keep the scene fairly bright and we got that at around 1/4000 of a second
f/2 and ISO 50. At that point though we simply add in the B2 at full
power with high-speed sync enabled and we're flashing and adjusting the light to
simply control the direction and to control the catchlight. Speaking of the catch-
-light in the eyes, we can zoom into these images and see that beautiful
beauty dish catchlight that's created from the OCF Beauty Dishes. Also, look at that
resolution! 50 megapixels with an incredibly sharp lens gets you images
that are absolutely breathtaking in terms of quality.
I hope you all enjoyed this video. Be sure to check out the new Profoto OCF
Beauty Dishes because I'm gonna go ahead and say that these are my new favorite
on-the-go light modifiers. Be sure to check out the article in the link below
this video. Subscribe to the channel if you enjoy this video. My name is Pye, I'll see
you all in the next video.