![]() ![]() Want hard light? Pull your focusing rod out so that the light head is close to the base of the parabolic reflector and fire away. This allows you to create a variation of hard light and soft light based on your focusing rod position, giving you a lot of versatility with your light. ![]() Secondly, a parabolic reflector offers a focusing rod, which can effectively change the size of the reflector by moving the light forward and backward, adjusting the ‘amplitude’ of the reflector’s wave design. How Stuff Works has an easy-to-follow explanation and visual representation of how this happens, but in essence, the same design applies with lighting and a parabolic modifier. By having that feedhorn directly center, it’s able to bounce the radio waves off of the dish at several angles, and the bounced waves will leave the dish completely parallel. If we continue with the satellite dish comparison, think of this as the rod that sits in the middle of a satellite dish. Whereas an umbrella will often mount slightly above or below the center of the light (through an umbrella shaft porthole), a parabolic reflector mounts the light center with the amplitude of the wave shape, giving you a nearly parallel light reflection similar to what you see with sunlight. For one, the light mounts to a focusing rod and cage within the parabolic reflector, which centers it so that the light source fills the reflector before bouncing out and toward your subject. So, what makes parabolics so special? The Features of a Parabolic ReflectorĪt first sight, it might be easy to confuse a parabolic reflector with an overengineered umbrella or even an octabox, but there are a few key features that make them far more unique than either of those options. Through the use of these scientific terms and aggressive patents, parabolic reflectors have always been notoriously expensive tools within photography, and only recently have brands been able to create their own parabolic reflectors at a (somewhat) affordable price. However, this comes at a cost – most notability, chromatic aberration (the rainbowy edges often seen in fresnels and spotlights). These lenses will refract the light rays to better direct the light into a parallel ray. The most obvious lens for something like this, since light ray quality is not important, is the use of Fresnel lenses. The other way to mimic the parallel rays of the sun is to use a lens to focus the light beams (similar to how a camera lens focuses the light onto a camera sensor/film). ![]() While this works well, you’ll need a very powerful strobe to handle such a tool, as it absorbs the majority of the light. The first way is to block out the bouncing light rays, bringing it to a single point, by using something like a Hardbox. While umbrellas, softboxes, and other modifiers will do their best to control this chaotic output shooting in all directions, they can only do so much – because truly parallel light requires a lot of distance to be achieved.īut, impersonating sunlight can be effectively cheated in several ways. You see, when light leaves a studio strobe, it leaves the bulb in all directions. This is why the sun has several unique characteristics that strobes cannot mimic, such as shadow size and sharpness. The average distance Earth has to the sun is around 93 million miles (150 million km), and so when the rays of light from the sun hit our atmosphere, the light rays are almost exactly parallel. Sure, strobes are no match for the 432K radius of the sun, the light projection is also extremely difficult to imitate. While the goal of light modifiers is to mimic the sun, that is far more challenging than one might think. And while I normally wouldn’t confess a preference towards a particular modifier – because they each serve their purpose – if you’ve followed my work for a while, you’ll know that I love parabolic lighting modifiers. Small modifiers are designed to mimic a bright sunny day, whereas large modifiers diffuse the light like on an overcast day. ![]() However, fundamentally, strobes are designed to mimic sunlight, and modifiers are designed to mimic the weather conditions included in sunlight. The flexibility and control it gives me far outweigh any of the benefits I’ve found with natural light. I love using studio strobes in my photography work. ![]()
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