Feathering the light

Lotto wrote in post #6212090
The sweet spot of the light off the softbox is at directly front and center of the box, the light at that spot will also be brighter then the the area higher/lower, left/right of the sweet spot.

Hi Lotto,

While that is absolutely true of some modifiers there are many high quality modifiers that will only vary by 1/10 of a stop from center to edge or corner. Typically inexpensive and generic modifiers have very uneven output across the front diffuser.

Feathering is possibly worthwhile if you're using umbrellas as they have no diffuser to even the output of the strobe. If using a softbox then feathering is a waste of time - if your softbox is even moderately well-designed it will eliminate the need for feathering and if it is cheap and inadequate to the point that it has a strong hot-spot, it's pretty cheap and simple to modify it to add more diffusion and/or deflection, which is a much more practical solution than having to point it away from your subject every shoot and deal with the subsequent light-spill and reflection.

ive bene having this discussion with some pro friends of mine. i kepe telling em that a softbox should not have hotspots and if they do they need to change it.

but i think the better way is to just know you have a hot spot and go around it. feather the center away from the body and more to the face for portraits. we usually put the softbox in a way that covers the length of the body, but with a hotspot the navel area appears hotter than the face on a standing portrait. did i explain that correct?

when we place the softbox the top most portion of the softbox is like a few inches above the model's head which gives us maximum coverage for the box.

is this even the correct way of positiong the light?

granted if your SB has a hotspot you now will have to use less of the softbox or position the model creatively to use full SB coverage.

I'm using umbrellas. I tried feathering last night like I said I would. It appears to work very well when you are using a reflector to provide the fill light. The link will take you to a photo on the board that I shot using one 580 EXII camera left and a silver reflector camera right. I feathered the light so that the reflector would receive a good portion of it and so that the lower part of the frame would be illuminated.

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=561564

Even if a sofbox is perfect in its light distribution across its surface, there will always be an ability to exploit the rapid but not instaneous falloff at the edges, thru feathering!

agreed wilt, removing light from the background or adding light to it, making the light wrap around the model by placing the softbox a bit in front of the model....