Beauty Dish Grid - Light Pattern on Background

The image below was taken with the dish about 8 foot away from the wall. The setup is an elinchrom ranger quadra in a 22" beauty dish using a ~30* grid.

Is the visible honeycomb pattern on the edges of the light falloff typical or is it just my setup?

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If your center diffuser is adjustable try moving it in slightly. That should take care of the issue.

Never seen anything like that with any of my dishes - definitely not acceptable to me.

Are you using a deflector? if so, it's not large/close enough as mentioned above. Dishes with a smooth silver interior are far more likely to project unusual patterns but even they shouldn't do this if the deflector is in the right place.

Thanks guys.

Here's a comparison with the delector moved closer to the flashtube (top image).

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That's really interesting because I have the Speedotron 22" dish with a grid and I've done a lot of testing to see falloff where the dish was pointing at a white background and exposure was set to retain detail, but I've never seen that pattern, and I use the Elinchrom mini silver deflector.

Rob - how far from the flashtube do you position the mini deflector?

Rai33 wrote in post #8305880
Rob - how far from the flashtube do you position the mini deflector?

Hi Rai,

When I use the mini deflector I place it about 1.25 inches from the front of the flash tube.

Thanks Rob - thats very close in comparison to mine. Looking at pictures of the Alienbee and Speedotron dishes it appears their reflectors are significantly larger so sounds like I need to move my deflector in pretty close.

The mini deflector is smaller than most discs and if you place it too far from the flash tube then you get a weird mix of bounced light and the light that leaks out the sides of the deflector. I played with the setup a bit before I determined that the deflector needs to go pretty darn close to the flash tube to create the same effect as those dishes with largers discs.

Rob - found a shot with a reflection of my dish before I moved the deflector closer to the flashtube....

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Rai33 wrote in post #8305526
The setup is an elinchrom ranger quadra in a 22" beauty dish using a ~30* grid.

sorry if this was asked before, but which BD are you using?

abdul10000 wrote in post #8309162
sorry if this was asked before, but which BD are you using?

Abdul - i ended up getting this one --> click here (shipping costs to Australia killed my idea of getting the Kacey dish or a Speedotron).

For anyone interested below is the result using the larger Elinchrom silver deflector and a slight modification to the speedring. The Elinchrom compatible speedring fitted to the dish is shiny silver with the lip actually sitting inside the dish. As the light was bounced off the delfector it appeared to hit the shiny ring and create an even larger hotspot surrounding the flashtube (as per the picture of the dish above). To remedy this I sprayed the visible part of the speedring white.


Before:

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Yep, the results look much better with the larger deflector which fits in with my experience of beauty dishes. Congrats.

Good job of rectifying the problem.

I use only the large deflectors for my Elinchrom BD,never thought of using my smaller ones.

Kindest

For the OP (nice diagnosis and fix btw) and others who mount Eli lights to non-Eli BDs - in the cases where the mount has the tube recessed further back than you'd get with an Eli BD, how do you see it effecting the lighting - specifically at the edges, etc?

In some mods I've seen, the Eli flash tube doesn't sit fully INSIDE the BD and in one case (Speedotron IIRC), it gave a very hard edge/abrupt transition at the edge of the light pattern vs a gradual fall off.