[PART 1] Official BLF GT Group Buy thread. Group buy officially closed! Lights shipping.

Hmm… well, I am really deathly afraid of dangerous animals peering at me from the bushes afar while I am out in the park walking the dog at night. My dog ain’t afraid, heck he points them out … but me? I am terrified. I hope to light the suckers up at 2000 meters in order to have ample time to run ROTFL… :wink:

…and the lightsaber effect… :smiling_imp:

Thank you again for the fast response in resolving this issue.

Saying that you set the white balance on Auto is not an insult but a fact as per the report of the EXIF of your pictures.

I understand, but a lot of batteries don’t ship here and that is a problem. Only a few sites ship here to asia.

Thanks for adding me to the list again, appreciate it.

I’m glad the facebook post got cleared up, I felt it was misplaced but good intentions.

I started to come on here and ask, last night, what fixed white point would be acceptable.

It was starting to rain, lightning was pounding the Eastern skies, and I rushed it. I kinda have this thing about standing out in the open with an aluminum tripod and a magnesium bodied flashlight while lightning looks for me. Not really into it.

I had planned to take the camera to within a couple of hundred yards of the tower and do a 4K video of the lights playing across it, but the rain…

If the weather permits I will try tonight, will fix Kelvin temp to 5700K and shoot video so the light that hits the tower will show clearly from nearby without other light pollution. I know the guy that lives virtually across the road from the tower. The tower is a couple of hundred yards across the field, but the road is a 60mph road and people have a tendency to zoom by, so I’ll set up in his driveway or in the back of my truck parked in the ditch beside the fence, either way, I’ll once again make the effort and take it all the way this time.

Simple, of course for me to process the pictures and white balance them, but I felt it important to show SOOC jpegs.

For the record, in the real world, with not only my eyes but everyone around me, both of the GT’s I got showed orange on a wall shot. There are variances emitter to emitter without doubt. I am not trying to argue a point, although it may seem that way, but am merely trying to show what 2 GT’s that I have in hand are actually doing.

I didnt want to be the person to say it…
You CAN get better results at any price though. You are very disillusioned if you think your 5D is the pinical of photography equipment. Its very good, very capable but not the best.

  • I too am a canon person. Own a 7D, 70-200 too but I know my limitations.

I have a fully calibrated monitor for editing photos but truth be known I hate it. I prefer my own colours to my eyes but there you go.

You’ll also notice when I commented earlier that I’d lock it to a specific white balance rather than leave it in auto.

Just scrolled back to your comment, if you are planning on fixing the colour temp I will do the same - “will fix Kelvin temp to 5700K”… hell, for my photos I’ll use the same settings as you if you like. I’m not sure if you mentioned it but was you shooting at 2.8 or higher?

I made a quick video that I hope demonstrates why evaluating color temperature on the internet is hard. I hope this is useful to everyone! White Balance is hard and you can’t trust your display devices unless you’ve gone through great pains to make sure everything is matched!

Hooray! 819 and 886 just showed up. DHL truck this time, not USPS. He knocked and I didn’t hear so he called. Nice guy to do that or I would have missed them. No advanced call or tracking number email or text.

The nice thing about being a photographer, I can change the camera settings AFTER the fact… :wink:

Here are the 3 shots from last night, base, cool white, and warm white, with ISO1600 f/4.0 and .5 sec exposure and Kelvin temperature set to 5700K.



I shoot in RAW + Med Jepg, RAW CR2 files go to a Compact Flash card, processed Jpg images go to an SD card. By opening the RAW image in the Canon software I am able to set the color temperature as desired, after the fact. I set all three of these to 5700K and made NO other changes. No sharpening, no noise reduction, nothing. So these 3 images, aside from being resized from Image Shack to save bandwidth on the forum Now full res, for detail, are exactly what the full frame sensor saw when I shot the image yesterday, with the Kelvin temperature set to 5700K.

Much better thank you.
I’m lazy and shoot jpg only :frowning:

Now I just need to go back to the office to my calibrated screen as this laptop display is of questionable quality.

I am in Sydney and nothing yet.

I am probably getting mine in March as I live in OZ and I stupidly ordered batteries as well!

Who in Australia near Sydney can change my LED if needed?

I was wondering if it’s the blue cloud in front of the lighted object that makes it look as if it’s brighter.
Because the contrast between the tower and the background look similar.
None the less, i was experimenting a bit with the pictures myself, and even after attempting to make the white balance, brightness and contrast the same, the cool white looks brighter than the neutral white.
So i’m not sure what’s going on, because the stills from VoB’s video seem to show a brighter hotspot for the neutral white, along with a rather yellow corona.

Yeah those white-balanced photos do look like a better comparison. Of course its all still just opinion, but I still easily prefer the neutral white. The glare from that blue beam blocks the whole right side of the image. You can’t even see that further row of trees in the background in the cw pic, the treeline between the two power lines, but with the nw all that glare goes away and there’s the trees. Nice comparison.

Dale I’m feeling a bit guilty of asking for those comparison shots. As soon as it became apparent that the cw seemingly shown more light (to me) downrange it became time to call into question your equipment and anything else. Guys just because some people a cooler beam doesn’t necessarily mean our judgement is off. Dale I won’t blame you a bit if you forget all about the beam shots, especially since you make your living as a photographer.

4000k is far from a “warm orange tint”. It may only appear so if you turn it on after your eyes have adjusted to a cool white light source. 4000k is very neutral

I just put in some high CRI 4000K LED bulbs in our kitchen and my gf initially wanted me to replace them because they were “too blue” lol

Well, I made the mistake to assume that my light should be shipped according to the ”the list”. Now I understand that my light will be in my hand earliest in April 2018 and I am among the first 555. If I should have known that the light was backordered due to the batteries I shouldn’t have ordered batteries.

My 2nd GT arrived today

USA, West coast side of the globe

Eh, Dale’s been around. He knows how it goes. I hope he doesn’t think anyone is being combative or anything like that, I certainly don’t mean to be. I think we’ve just had a good discussion is all. I mean we gotta talk about something around here now that lights are shipping… :smiley: