What is a Beauty Dish ?

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All,

A question: I read somewhere that George Hurrell used a beauty dish – but in all the books/photo's I can find of him at work, I cannot see any evidence of one in use. Can anyone throw any light on this (no pun intended). I am not skilled enough to recognise one by its pattern on a print.

Look forward to your enlightenment (no pun intended ).

PB

[C. D. Keth]

It's a type of reflector on a strobe. It just looks like a big wok. If you were to google "beauty dish" you would see many, many photos of them in different sizes.

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Hi Chris, thanks for the reply – I apologise if I have caused confusion – I know what one looks like hence my question about not seeing one in the pictures....

[C. D. Keth]

Oh, I'm afraid i can't shed any light on George Hurrel's use, or not, of any specific piece of equipment. Very often writers get confused and see some stuff on a studio wall and assume it gets used a lot when it doesn't.

[Jason Greenberg Motamedi]

Apparently Hurrell made use of a scoop, which was mistaken to be a beauty dish, at least on model mayhem.

[Leigh]

... which was mistaken to be a beauty dish, at least on model mayhem.

There's an error on MM??? No, can't be.

Oh, the shame of it all. We'll never live it down. Our reputation is ruined.

Back on topic... I don't think beauty dishes existed when Hurrell was working, did they?

- Leigh

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Back on topic... I don't think beauty dishes existed when Hurrell was working, did they?

- Leigh

Right back at ya – Oh I dunno, I always thought Hurrell photos were all about beauty dishes.

[Ed Bray]

I think you will find that a lot of his models were lit with light from a spotlight shone though a 'Fresnel Lens'.

The hard shadows with sharp edges are a bit of a giveaway. Fortunately the models were very well made up with great make up as this type of light is not very forgiving to blemishes.

Portrait photographers tend to use softboxes and umbrellas to light their subjects these days, it takes a lot more skill to light a portrait well with a hard light.

[Alan Gales]

I have a book on Hurrell that contains quite a few photos that show his set up with the models and there are no beauty dishes used. No snoots or barn doors either. It mentions in the book that he used arc lights, lightweight Mole-Richardson spots and a Bardwell-McCallister boomlight. It does mention that sometimes he would drape material over his lights to soften them.

I'm not saying that he didn't use any light modifiers but the pictures in my book don't show any.

[Brian C. Miller]

"Balcar, an innovator in lighting since 1952, invented the beauty dish (as far as I know)." (PDF link)

So the beauty dish definitely wasn't in use, as a product anyways, before 1952. BTW, that's a nice comparison of some beauty dishes. They all have a slightly different character to them.

This isn't to say that photographers weren't using them prior to 1952. It's basically a big flat reflector, maybe with something in front of the bulb.