Lighting Setup For Tabletop Flowers

Here is a setup that I used when photography some flowers. I wanted a white background. The flash helps with that. I had to stop down to f8 to get a slow enough shutter speed  to fire the flash properly. Anything above 1/250 sec would get the shutter in the way. I also used this setup for the focus stacking experiment I blogged about earlier. It worked well for that. The two 85W daylight fluorescent bulbs give good light. I am happy with the results and will use this setup again.

Photo above taken with setup shown.

Free "Diagram Designer" program as lighting diagram drawing program

I have recently been interested in creating some lighting diagrams. I looked at an online tool, Online Lighting Diagram Creator, by Quoc Huy . It's OK and adequate for some. Being the geek, I wanted something more, something I could control, build, and expand. I had already been using Meesoft's free Diagram Designer program at work. I like it a lot. One feature of the program is that it allows you to create your own symbol templates. I went to work creating some lighting objects. Here is a picture of a simple lighting diagram created with Diagram Designer and the symbols I created.

Text and other symbols can be added at will, making this a useful tool. You can also insert images, so you can add an image to illustrate the lighting setup. The diagram can be printed from the software.

The program is a little crude in the way that text is formatted. But once you do it a few times it becomes easier. It is free after all.

One drawback of the program is that it can only export diagram as a pdf file. I use a screen capture program to save the diagram as a jpeg.