Michael Carty Photography Bliz-zog: DIY Beauty Dish, Awwww Jeahhhhh!!

Hey Peeps,

A lot of you know how tempting it is to spend money you don't have on gear you desperately want right?

That's why I LOVE DIY's!!

So what I did was make my own Beauty Dish - and it rocks!

For a fraction of the cost of your high-end dish, I have made one that looks and works just as well and of course, I have documented it for you!

First off, I got all of my materials together and went to my step-father's shop(thank the gods for his love of power tools).

as you can see, I am VERY organized

ring bracket, 9" pizza plate, 20qt bowl

These were the first things I needed, I wanted to design the dish to attach to my Canon 580EX II flash. The ring bracket didn't have holes big enough for the bolts that I purchased, so we drilled some new ones.

don't cry, it didn't feel a thing...

Using the bracket, we measured where they would go in the bowl, hammered the spots and drilled those holes.

marking where we will drill, see me in the reflection?

a nice spike to mark the holes

holes drilled in dish

same thing with pizza dish

After the holes were drilled, we marked off a hole to cut out of the bottom of the dish that would fit the head of my flash.

would it be considered overkill cutting this out to get rid of the sticker?

We used a grinder to cut out the bottom.

I so enjoyed shooting these sparks

Next, we assembled the parts to make sure everything fit correctly.

three long bolts with nuts to hold them in place

these same bolts hold the bracket on the back of the dish

two more sets of nuts/bolt hold the pizza dish in place out from the main dish

I fell in love with this dish already.

Now it was time to get painting!!

We took everything apart, sanded down both dishes to make the paint stick, and painted the pizza dish and inside of the bowl with white aerosol paint.

yes, we used my childhood Dukes of Hazard bedsheet to catch drippings

tremclad paint, great stuff, dried within minutes, put several coats on

taped the back side of dish to keep paint from going through holes

After the white was finished drying, we flipped the main dish over and sprayed the back side with black paint.

so shiny and nice!

we used 6 small nails to keep the dish off the table so it wouldn't stick

We then applied a polycrylic protective sealer to protect the dish from dings(at least as much as possible) on both dish and bowl and sanded down the first few coatings.