My friendly neighborhood postal worker dropped off a package today with two Lumodi 14″ Beauty Dishes for us to try out. I just am getting them unboxed and setup with some speedlites but wanted to throw out a little teaser about these little guys. Why two you ask? One has the new “Soft White” coating and the other has the current  “Bright Silver” coating. The soft white has slightly more diffused output and the bright silver is Lumodi’s most light efficient coating and has a hotter center with faster fall off than the soft white.

Note that the dish on the right actually came with my studio logo on it. This is an option that is available for an extra nominal charge.

First Impressions

My first thoughts as I was unboxing them were “don’t treat these like the rest of your gear or you will destroy them faster than Godzilla walking through Tokyo”. To say that they are not made from thick plastic is a severe-understatement although this is not meant to imply that they are shoddy products at all. They are extremely lightweight and since they attach to the front of your speedlight, you want to keep from stressing your more expensive equipment. Being uber-light is also a key benefit when using “Poverty Wizards” such as the Cactus V2 which are notorious for not being able to hold much off-axis weight.

The mount is simply a friction-fit around your particular speedlight so you do need to specify which brand and model of speedlite you are going to be using.  Other than popping it onto your speedlite, there is no other setup required. However, if you are not used to firing your flash off-camera, you will need some way of doing that, a good starter solution is a long eTTL sync cord from FlashZebra.com.

In this final shot, one of the dishes is covered with the available diffuser sock that simply stretches around the dish to stay in place.

Stay tuned for a complete review of the Lumodi Beauty Dishes in the next couple of weeks while we figure out how to really make the most of them.

I still need to round up some subjects for a shoot, but in the meantime you can check out Lumodi’s website and their Lumodi Flickr Group.

Here are a few test pics from today:

Popularity: 4%