The Mini Beauty Dish (Flashpoint) Nikon SB800 Review

Recently I read a Forum Discussion about the value of the small Beauty Dishes that can be directly mounted on a hot shoe flash. Opinions of their value were quite divided, with a vocal fraction that came to a "useless" verdict.

A HA!  Time for another strobe-experiment.

For this test I used the Flashpoint (Adorama) Mini Dish and part of its Accessory Kit. The white reflector can be changed against a silver or gold one, and there are three grids with large medium and small grid mesh. The whole set also comes with color filers  which I did not test here as the effect should be obvious.

The Dish comes in two versions. One for smaller flash heads like the SB800 and one for larger flash heads like the SB900. Neither will fit on the Metz 45. One of the big complaint in one other test I read was, that "the Dish (tested) is completely useless because it has a ring of bright light around the center because the Dish and the flash have a very loose fit and there is a lot of light leakage."   If you use the correct version for your flash it will work. If you use the large version on a small flash, you will get a similar result like these testers.  Doehhhh! (Translation for not people who do not speak day to day English: "That result was to be expected as it was bleeding obvious from the beginning.")


THE SET UP
So I planted a SB800 on a light stand about 1,50 from a white wall. It was set as remote slave. On the camera I used the internal flash as commander. Set the internal flash to NIL output. and the remote flash to Manual 1/16 output. The camera was also set to manual 1/250 and f 5.6 to start with. I stood about 5m behind the flash.
 
THE TEST 


1/250, 
f5.6, 
no flash,









That is the picture with no flash. Ambient light is clearly no factor. The little dot is the ready light from the flash.
 

1/250,
f5.6, 
flash 24mm setting, 







I do see a nice distribution of light which falls off from center in a nice curve.
Nothing wrong here. Again it helps to select the right size to begin with!
The zoom head of the flash was set to 24mm.

1/250, 

f11, 

flash 24mm setting, 

The same flash setting  but the aperture closed 2 stops to 11. The picture is underexposed , but one can see the light fall of nicely

1/250,

f11,

flash 24mm setting, 

Same Setting, just a different camera angle to see if there are any hot spots, patterns or rings.

No! All is fine!

1/250, 

f11, 

flash 50mm setting,  

The zoom of the flash set to 50mm. Not much difference 

1/250, f11, flash 105mm setting, 

The zoom of the flash set to 105mm Again not much difference. The flash seems to loos a bit of power and the fall of seems to be a tad softer. 

All in all I would say when not making pictures of white walls it does not matter which way the zoom is set. I would probably leave it at 24mm. 

1/250, f11, flash 105mm setting, silver insert,


Here I kept everything equal, and just switched the white reflector for the silver one. Surprisingly the silver reflector just seems to eat up a stop of light and do not much else.

1/250, f11, flash 105mm setting, gold insert
 
The gold reflector gives golden light and eats about 2 stops of light.

1/250, f5.6, flash 105mm setting, gold insert

Opened the aperture to 5.6 and it is about the level of the picture with the white reflector above. So two stops is about right.

1/250, f11, flash 105mm setting,white insert,
large grid

That  gives a nice spot of soft light.

1/250, f11, flash 105mm setting,white insert, 
medium grid

That  gives a very narrow spot of soft light.

1/250, f11, flash 105mm setting, no insert, 
large grid


Here  I removed the insert completely so the flash shoots direct through the grid.

1/250, f16, flash 105mm setting, no insert, 
large grid


Here I lowered the aperture to 16 nice bright spot, And I am  reasonably happy with the light fall off.

1/250, f16, flash 105mm setting, no insert, 
medium grid


A nice spot effect. The dark area has no lights leaks.

1/250, f16, flash 105mm setting, no dish


This is the kind of light pattern the flash produces without the Dish. The form is quite horizontal.

1/250, f16, flash 50mm setting, no dish


This is the kind of light pattern the flash produces without the Dish with 50mm.

1/250, f16, flash 24mm setting, no dish


That delivers even light for large center spot. 

1/250, f16, flash 14mm setting (additional diffuser) , no dish


Quite even light pattern in the center but still a clear falloff in the corners.

1/250, f16, flash 14mm setting (additional diffuser) , flash head turned up 45 degrees, white card out


This is newspaper photogs favorite. It is actually a nice light pattern with a evenly lit center and falling off left and right. good for the typical three to four people group shot.






CONCLUSION

The Mini Beauty Dish gives a specific pattern of light output. That is exactly what we expect from a light former, not more not less. With the gold insert and the grids it becomes more versatile and can be used in a number of situations. It can not be easily replaced with the on board means from your flash.

Personally I think It widens my possibilities and I have used it at a number of occasions. I am happy with it. I own both sizes and use the one either fits the SB800 or the SB900.


Is it worth your money? That depends on your wallet and shooting subjects.

I find that with the gold reflector it produces  nice skin tones in people with Asian skin tone.

Father and Daughter

The picture was taken in north facing shade and was very cool without flash.


 P.S. Sorry for the baaaaad layout but the "new and improved" blogger editor sucks not only big time but also the will to live out of me. There is a lot of trial and error involved as the stupid editor shows you thing one way and the blog shows it in another, frankly I have given up for today. I will neaten it another time.

The Little Canon Flash

The small REVUEtron flash has been retired forever. In the last blog I sang his praise which was appropriate as he did indeed good service and it was his retirement speech after all. He is now gone and we can confess openly that he could be a pain in the ass at times.

The manual flash is not very precise as distances have to be estimated. (In advance.) It is completely unpractical in fluid situations when distances change rapidly. In Situations when there is sufficient time to calculate exposure and aperture, like in macro or still photography, the distances from Objects to flash and/or camera are so short that small errors of estimation make a noticeable difference, so one actually needs to measure them.

The (photographic) world was longing for some flash automation.

I planned to make some experiments with the little manual flash and then introduce two automated flash systems. Unfortunately the little REVUEtron left us so that I will jump right to the first flash system, CAT from Canon.

The idea of the CAT system was simple: The lens of the camera is focused anyway to the most important part of the picture, so one can use the focusing information from the lens and translate it somehow into an electronic signal to vary the flash output. (When the DSLRs appeared and the film based TTL did not work anymore. The technique of reading the focusing information from the lens was re-introduced.)

One catch of the Canon CAT system was that it worked only with cameras which where built specifically for it (a trend started by Canon that has become widely the norm today) and it worked only with a few select lenses.

For SLRs the CAT flash was the Speedlite 133D.
For compact cameras without interchangeable lens it was the Canolite D
For the Datematic and the Canon 110 Pocket camera it was the Canolite ED.

The Canolite ED, or short ED, is .... you might have guessed "The Little Canon Flash". I think I never owned a camera which would work with ED. So I really can not remember why and how I bought it. I am however pretty sure that it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. (In the picture ED is connected to a Mecalux 11 optical trigger from Metz.)


It works perfectly in manual mode and has a guide number of 14m. I will use ED for all the experiments I intended for the REVUEtron. ED is still in perfect working condition and I guess that it has to do with the fact that ED is powered by two AA batteries. ED has a flash ready lamp on the back and a guide number table for ISO 100. Any other ISO must be calculated. ED has no manual release switch! The recycle times with fresh batteries are about 3 to 4 seconds. Much faster than the REVUEtron Not bad.


I will not use the flash on a film camera because I am too lazy and to cheap to make the many intended test shots on film. Therefore I needed to trigger ED with a digital camera.

First a word of WARNING. Old flashes can have VERY high voltages on the contacts. Do not ever attach an unknown and/or old flash to your modern digital camera. Always consult your manual about the voltage your camera can take and then measure or look up the flash voltage.

A second word of warning: Your measurement might be very imprecise, but looking it up might not be safer as you put your trust in results that might be manufacturers specs of a new unit. Internet search for trigger voltage might produce a result, but it was measured by someone you don't know. And you do not know how good his equipment and method was.

How does ED measure. My Multitronic measurement device is very slow and therefore not very good in this situation. The problem is, that the flash fires the moment you connect the measuring probes of the Multitronic. So my readings when first charging the flash and then measuring were about 85 V. However I tried a second method by leaving the measurement device attached and then switching the flash on. It will charge and the voltage raises. At some point it will fire.
The reading in this case was about 165V. Hmmm that is the voltage when the flash will EARLIEST fire. I still do not know the voltage when it is FULLY charged, which might be considerable higher.

The Handbook of the Nikon D300s specifies 250V maximum. Sorry ED you will never be attached to it!

At this point I got sidetracked by the question how best to use photocells to fire ED when using Nikon i-TTL.

I have two models of all round photocells available: The Metz lux 11 and the China Import DS-1. The China Import claims to be specifically suited for digital flash systems with pre-flash. The half page manual is in a bit of a garbled English but makes a lot of sense once you ignore the grammar.

I tried three i-ttl flashes on my D300s: SB-800, SB-900 and Metz MZ54 4i

I got some expected and some unexpeced results:

The Metz photocell performed as expected. It did not work at all with any flash. The ED was fired by the pre flash and contributed nothing to the picture.

A flash picture of a flash! So far so good.

But listen to this: I tried the China gadget and it does NOT work with the SB-800 however it does work reliably and repeatedly with either the SB-900 or the MZ54 4i.

Why? I have no clue !


SB-800











SB-900: Hurray the ED fired in time!


More fun with the ED in the next post.