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I got a number of emails, and comments, asking if I would do a lighting diagram of how the cereal shot from Monday was done, but once I started working on the diagram, I realized how much I hate lighting diagrams, so I set the shoot back up and took a shot of the set-up (shown above–click for a larger view).

The table the cereal is on, is actually the portable laptop stand I use in my Lightroom Tour, —I just covered it with a white tablecloth. The handheld reflector (to the left of the cereal bowl) is actually a Lastolite pop-up gray card, but since one side is white, it makes a nice little reflector.

The light to the right of the Camera is a Westcott Spiderlight TD3 with daylight balanced fluorescent bulbs (I used the TD3 because I don’t need that much light from the softbox—just a little fill. If I needed stronger light, I’d use a TD5). The softbox is 24″x32″ (it doesn’t need to be that large, because the subject (a cereal bowl) is very small, so for lighting something this small, that softbox is huge (at least, in it’s size relative to the cereal bowl).

The camera is mounted on a Gitzo Traveler Tripod, with a Really Right Stuff BH-40 ballhead, and as I mentioned on Monday, I’m using a Nikon 70-200mm lens, but with the Canon Close-up lens (for Nikon) screwed onto the end, turning my regular zoom lens into a macro zoom lens. The key here is the natural light pouring in from the window behind the cereal, and overexposing slightly to give it that “morning sunlight” look.

Well, once I had this all set-up, I thought to myself, “I should actually shooting something.” So, I went to the kitchen and found this three-cheese bread (I bought it on Sunday, but for a different shoot idea, but I put it to use below).

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You can see it’s the exact same set-up, but if you look at the angle of the camera, you can see I framed the shot so you could see a little bit of the green plants outside the window, and the handle on the tray, to give it more of that “breakfast baked goods” feeling. Well, that’s it folks (sure beats a drawn lighting diagram). You can see the whole set-up is pretty simple, and it ain’t pretty, but it gets the job done.