LED Light Panel - BLInspirations

As I continued to look for suitable indoor macro photography subjects, I purchased a pair of tabletop LED light panels to help illuminate some of these subjects. When I received them, I realized the LED chips on the light panel would also make an interesting macro photography subject.

Each of these light panels have 60 LEDs with a combined light output of 1400 lumens. (For reference, a lumen is a measure of the total quantity of visible light emitted by a source and for comparison, a 100 watt incandescent bulb provides about 1600 lumens.) Each light panel included four diffusers / color filters: white, red, orange, and blue. There are photos of the LED array of one panel in the Additional Images section below, as well as a photo of the light panel with it’s stand.

The featured image is a closeup of a single LED chip created from three separate photographs using focus stacking in Photoshop to keep the entire LED in focus. (Please see the Definitions page for more information about focus stacking and macro photography.) The Additional Images section below also includes a closeup of a lit LED chip and an image of the LED with a steel rule to indicate its size (about 1/8″ wide) and the three photographs used to create that image using focus stacking, so you can see how shallow the depth of field of each photograph is. When Beverly first saw the featured image, she remarked that it looked like a pat of butter.