Overpowering Sunlight with diffused flash is about creating a lighting ratio. This is a a popular and easy technique for contemporary senior portraits, editorial portraits, and outdoor fashion photography. San Diego Fashion photographer Emily Soto provided us with another behind-the-scene video clip demonstrating her superb fashion style and diffused flash lighting technique.

Pay close attention to how Emily uses diffused lighting ratios and depth-of-field and focuses the lens on the subject, while blurring out the foreground and background. Try this technique for your next senior portrait or outdoor editorial portrait session….it is not just for fashion anymore!

This time we see Emily using a Mola Softlight Dish instead of a beauty dish for overpowering Sunlight with diffused flash. And from what I can tell, Emily is still using an Alien Bee monolight and Vagabond battery pack. While a beauty dish can offer a similar diffused flash light quality, the wavy curves and distinctive shape of the Mola dish lends a softer light quality. For those photographers already using a beauty dish, I suggest diffusing your dish further with a sheet of ripstop nylon. Just drape it over your beauty dish and secure it with a few $.49 clamps from the local HomeDepot. You may find white ripstop nylon at your local fabric store for about $8 per sq/yd…it’s very inexpensive folks!

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