I rented a B30 for a quick family shoot over the weekend (my family, I don't do this for a living). I saw the B30 had an umbrella mount built in, and I have several standard umbrellas and umbrella boxes, so I didn't rent any modifiers, just the grid / filter holder and some CTO gel filters. The plan was golden hour, backlit with the B30 providing fill..
Unfortunately the weather ended up really overcast, and very windy, so I had to just go with the bare flash (with is standard flat diffusion plate). However, the light was awesome to work with, as was the connect pro remote. I'm now considering purchasing the setup, but I was curious about the Profoto Glass Dome, and just how soft and diffused the light is out of it. I'm not even sure this is a thing to be honest, it seems like the glass dome might be something people use with other modifiers and not just the glass dome by itself?
Sharing an example of a shot where the hard shadows are completely obvious and bug the heck out of me, but thankfully generative fill took care of the biggest offenders in my final, edited image.
For those that've used the glass dome, would it have softened up these shadows to a significant degree? I know it's not going to be a softbox, but I'm curious just how useful the glass dome is in this scenario vs the standard flat diffusion plate.
I use the original Acute/D4 heads and the purpose of the dome is to spread the light to fill modifiers like umbrella, SB, and BD. The dome itself produces a super-even and beautiful light, but those qualities are only evident at close range like under a foot. At the distance of your shoot, there will be zero difference. Only a large modifier will soften the shadows generated by your off-axis light placement. Nothing wrong with hard light (I use it most of time time) but you want to position it directly over the camera by 1-2ft to drop the shadow straight behind each subject. Off-axis hard light is easy with one subject, but group shots require careful placement of light and subjects—an advanced topic. Here's Caravaggio showing how it's done!
Every shadow and light beam lands at the intended point.
rico wrote:
I use the original Acute/D4 heads and the purpose of the dome is to spread the light to fill modifiers like umbrella, SB, and BD. The dome itself produces a super-even and beautiful light, but those qualities are only evident at close range like under a foot. At the distance of your shoot, there will be zero difference. Only a large modifier will soften the shadows generated by your off-axis light placement. Nothing wrong with hard light (I use it most of time time) but you want to position it directly over the camera by 1-2ft to drop the shadow straight behind each subject. Off-axis hard light is easy with one subject, but group shots require careful placement of light and subjects—an advanced topic. Here's Caravaggio showing how it's done!
Every shadow and light beam lands at the intended point. ...Show more →
Thanks! I kind of thought maybe I was overthinking the glass dome a bit, seems to make more sense it's just for use with other modifiers.
Definitely agree with you on the light and subject placement. Some lessons learned there. I had planned to do a variety of setups, and if the wind had died down, to get out the larger soft-brella-box to combat the hard shadows. Sadly the wind and cold weather (and cold people) and a hungry 9 year old weren't a great mix for careful experimentation. :P
The glass dome only really makes sense in conjunction with other modifiers, on it's own it won't do much. Some modifiers like the Hard Box, Pro Box, etc require a dome but are ideally used with a protruding flash tube (Pro or Acute heads), not just a protruding dome.
I've never seen a compelling demonstration of the domes being better in general purpose use (umbrella, softbox, hard reflector, etc). Profoto themselves had some demos on softbox evenness of fill between flat/protruding and showed no difference when the first flat front D series lights came out.
As someone with a bunch of protruding dome Acute heads and flat front B10 series lights, I can confidently say that the "dome-iness" of the light is the absolute least of my considerations when it comes to picking the lamp head for a task.
BrandonSi wrote:
If you have any images with the glass dome, I'd love to see them!
Again, this relates to the Acute/D4 head that was shipped stock with a frosted dome. I use the head unmodified as key if the subject is close and if, of course, a hard light treatment is desired:
There are essentially three light sources in this image: (1) bare light key for subject sparkle, (2) secondary key from bounce panel for subject shaping, (3) ambient fill from wall bounce using a different head.
Example with snoot where the catchlight is the bare bulb:
Finally, a related topic where one might want to identify AI-generated images. The trick is reading how hard shadows fall which appears to be an AI weakness (at the current time):
