Mediastyle Redux – HoneyGrid, Beauty Dish & Ringflash

Part of the Mediastyle shoot was this small wall that, literally, popped out in areas, I couldn’t resist hitting it with some light and using it as a backdrop. I knew it needed to be simple, but effective, and I’d been itching to use the HoneyGrid for my Elinchrom Softlight (Beauty Dish).

For those that don’t know; grids channel your light into a much narrower beam to give you control over the edges and spill of that light. Normally a beauty dish has a bit of spread (the fade from light to dark) once the light hits the end of the bowl, but slapping the grid on there beams the light directly at your subject. So much so, actually, that if you don’t position it right you’ll miss your mark.

To my knowledge, honeycombgrids.com is the only game in town for these beauty dish grids – no, Elinchrom does not make them, and if they did I can assume they’d be twice as much – and the retail price is reasonable considering the cost of most photo supplies. The construction is good, a light piece of welded metal encircling a plastic honeycomb pattern grid, you can see how and what they make it out of here. The unit comes with Velcro that you stick one end onto your beauty dish and bang, you’re ready to go.

While I think light control is important, and there’s certainly value in the purchase itself, there was one snag that made me hold off on the purchase for a while: Shipping. How shipping cross-border from the U.S. to Canada is determined I’m not exactly privy to, or how a light, flat and round grid can cost more than a few light stands from B&H can only be explained through complex algorithms that may be rounding pi to a different integer. Shipping was $10 less than the cost of the item itself.

Ouch.

Sometimes us Canadians get shafted.

Thanks Lee for your hard work on this shoot. If you want to see the full lighting specs on the above image you can see it over on Flickr.

Posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2012 at 10:38 am. Filed under: Portraits, Review Tags: grids, Lighting, Strobist RSS 2.0 feed.