I spent most of this weekend hunting down the pieces for and assembling a DIY beauty dish to attach to my flash. I got my instructions from a Strobist link to a Dave Tejada construction of some rando on Flickr’s beauty dish. It’s comprised of a $4 14″ terra cotta bowl (Home Depot garden), a $2 gutter downspout piece (Home Depot), an empty 50 CD spindle (my computer desk), a $3 convex mirror (Auto Zone), and some odds and ends like adhesive velcro to create a way to strap it to your flash. I also spent $10 on both black and white paint to make it look semi-professional. It ended up costing me about $20 and a couple hours’ work (20 minutes if you’re not a dumbass with a Dremel tool), but decent beauty dishes start at a minimum of $100, so I’m not complaining. I had photos of its progress, but accidentally deleted them off my camera.

I put the finishing touches on it this afternoon and really wanted to shoot some high fashion, but the only beauty I know was writing a school paper, so I had to settle for Kyle. He’s a dish, I suppose. Kyle and I shot random shit for about 20 minutes in the building’s lobby when Ben stopped by, so I decided to take photos of him, since Kyle has already made my photoblog like 15 times. I didn’t even end up using the dish in the traditional sense. See, the main reason I wanted a dish is because as simple and versatile as my umbrellas are, they create TERRIBLE catch lights (that’s the reflection of the light source in your subject’s eye). 99% of portraits are shot with softboxes, not only because of the quality of light from them, but because they create pretty nondescript catch lights that don’t draw a whole lot of attention. My umbrella, on the other hand, creates a really distracting octagon with dark spines in the eyes and it just looks awful. Softboxes are expensive, and again, are used in 99% of portraiture, so I also didn’t want to get myself in a rut or routine right off the bat with one. I think the dish is a good compromise for the time being. All that said, I didn’t even really end up taking too many photos with prominent catch lights (in fully half of them, I was trying to avoid lighting the eyes at all), so it was all moot.

So I mostly had Ben sit and tell me about his internship at this comic studio while I moved lights around him and fired shots off. With this approach, Ben didn’t tense up because of the intimidation of being surrounded in flashes and having a lens stuck in his face. He was just telling a story and I was just experimenting; it made the shots look a lot more natural and candid. I’ll remember this for the future when I need to shoot portraits of somebody I don’t know.

I shot maybe 80 photos of Ben tonight. Here’re a couple.

1. Ben talking. 2. It doesn’t matter how trivial this phone call was. This lighting makes it the most important phone call ever conducted. 3. The photo on the dust jacket of Ben’s autobiography. 4. Again, as ridiculous as the lighting and apparent “posing” are in this photo, I think we were talking about Tin-Tin or something.

An additional photo of Ben became my photoblog’s update tonight.