This deep 24″ collapsible beauty dish folds down to just 6″
Jun 16, 2016
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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Designed by portrait photographer Joel Grimes, the new 24″ Rapid Box Beauty Dish from Westcott seems to tick all of the boxes when it comes to location photography. It’s small, lightweight, and can also double up as a regular 24″ round softbox by adding the diffuser panel on the front.
Having lightweight and portable kit is important when you’re working on location, especially if you don’t have assistants or other crew with you to help you lug it around. In this video from Joel & Westcott, we’re going to see how this one works and how it can be used on location.
I don’t often tend to think about using a beauty dish on location. Usually it’s a 2ft square softbox or 4ft octabox if I need modifiers out in the wild, but I could see this being pretty handy, and offer more options over the standard 2ft boxes I use right now.
Folding up like an umbrella lets this 2ft beauty dish folds down to a diameter of just 6″. It also comes with its own bag to carry it around in. It looks similar size to a tripod bag, and with a big long strap, you can just throw it over your shoulder and off you go.
It comes in five different mount options; Balcar, Bowens, Elinchrom, Photogenic and Profoto, which means that you may not be travelling so lightweight anyway if you have to carry strobes and battery packs around with you.
But, with a modifer this small, especially when you’re using it at distances of only 2-4ft away from your subject, a speedlight can often stand up to the job just fine, even in bright sunlight. All my modifiers are Bowens fit for in the studio, but a simple speedlight bracket with a Bowens mount on the front lets me use any of my strobe modifiers on location (albeit with a much lower power).
It’d be interesting to see how well one of these stands up to full time location use in the real world. I used to go through umbrellas like crazy, replacing them about every month or two as they succumbed to the rigours of daily use on location. My 4ft octa (which also folds up along similar lines to an umbrella) is much tougher construction, but also now needs replacing after about a year or so of use.
The 24″ Rapid Box Beauty Dish is available now for $299.
What are your favourite location modifiers, and why? Let us know in the comments.
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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9 responses to “This deep 24″ collapsible beauty dish folds down to just 6″”
wow £210 a great looking item but once again way overpriced
That’s why I’m curious about the build quality and durability. Knowing Westcott, though, it probably won’t suck. :)
There’s a big difference in price between the Lastolite Ezybox and the $40 24″ speedlight softboxes you often find on eBay, too.
They may both produce an almost identical quality of light when new, but the Lastolite one will easily outlast several of the cheaper copies. I’ve owned several of the cheap ones over the years, and they tend to start warping in shape after about 6 months of regular use.
So, long term, it can end up being cheaper to go for the more expensive option because you don’t have to replace them as often.
I’d just use a Elichrom Deep Octa, which is similar.
$299 for this? I would like to say they are overpriced, but this seems to be the norm now, unless you want some cheap stuff made of Chinesium.
I will go with market. If people buy it, they’ll keep the high price. If people do not buy it, they’ll be forced to lower it. Remember when Apple launched the first iPhone at $600 with contract; they had to lower the price because poor sales.
Yeah, that and it was buggy as hell. ;)
The Samsung S7 is $600 and it’s doing pretty well.
I’m sure they’re pricing it against what Broncolor is selling their product for. The Westcott is a duplicate (copy) of their Para line.
I know it’s a new product and r&d probably factors into the price but holy jesus, this thing is expensive. Like really expensive. As Daris said previously, might as well use an Elinchron deep octa, which is 27.5″ and $288 on amazon. Plus the elin takes disc modifiers to further configure the light. Even Profoto has a 24″ folding dish that’s only $179.
Yeah, if this was under $200, I’d buy it in a heartbeat..