How to do a review ? Help guide: share your Tips and Tricks.

for me… the good review is always end up with pictures of beamshot of the light with comparison to other popular lights.
so it can help you decide if you want to pull the trigger or not to buy that light.
any review with no pics of beamshot is just like believing a used car salesman’s word :Sp

Thanks.

So it seems that a comparison between a few lights is appreciated.

And oh, I didn't say that there has to b a set of rules to make a review,but I think it's just good to know what the average BLF use is interested to see.

Which makes it easier for reviewers to decide what and how to do a review.

Me, for example have no woods or fields around my house, so I can't take beamshots in nature. I could only possibly do indoor beam shots.

So it seems that a conclusion at the end is also something what people want.

Keep them coming.

What I said, link are welcome.

A question was: why pictures? For me there are two reasons. First: a picture shows more than you can ever describe in words, it can make a review more clear and compact, second: it makes the reading more pleasant. But I agree that numerous pictures of almost the same makes a review boring (I even sometimes find the great reviews of master-reviewer Foy a bit too picture-crowded to my liking).

How do I make pictures for BLF? I do not claim to make great pictures, but I do try to pay some attention to them. There are many better ways to make pictures but this is how I do it:

I have a good quality compact camera, but for pictures that I post on BLF I always use my phone camera (at the monent that is a Sony Xperia Z, it has a nice camera). The reason is that the lens (and sensor) is much smaller, so that you can get close to your object to make easy macro-pictures with good depth of focus. If I want to zoom in more I use this small self-made loupe (I retrieved the lens from somewhere inside a disused spectrofotometer, the 17mm driver is for size reference, the loupe is really small). I clamp it with an elastic band in front of the camera lens like this:

For that really zoomed in enlarged picture I have a stereo microscope (one of my former hobbies has been collecting microscopes), this is the (famous) Olympus zoom. I make the pictures through one of the eye-pieces (that is easy with a phone camera and more difficult with larger-lens camera's):

The best pictures I make with daylight, the diffuse light from the sky makes the clearest pictures. Because work and familylife take up most of my daylight time my hobby is confined to late at night when everone else is sleeping, so mostly no daylight for me . Instead, I light my objects from two sides, one side is the desktop lamp (with a modern 2700K Philips led bulb in it ), the other side is a floody flashlight with a Nichia 219. It produces a typical kind of photo that I quite like, but it may not be the clearest way.

I always touch up the pictures a bit (with the simple photo editor in the Mac Preview application) and resize them, and I make make the picture as small as possible without loosing the essence of the picture. I then upload them to -in my case- flickr.com.

Very helpful Djozz, thanks!

Especially your ideas concerning close up shots using your phone and a loupe.

Hope this will be helpful for others as well, that can start experimenting with taking pictures.

Your tips about using 2 lights, one at each side, is also really helpful, because that would eliminate the strong shadows on each side..

Still what I would suggest, is bouncing these side lights of a white board...keep forgetting the name of that stuff, that is used in boxes for shipping. It's very lightweight. What do you call that?

Do you mean styrofoam board? Yes, that would be a better way of lighting than with the two point-sources I use. I am usually too lazy to set-up a good lighting equipment, and I can't have a permanent set-up because when the family wakes up the hobby should be back in that one small corner of the computer desk (well, it keeps me tidy, that's a good thing).

I don’t know I prefer having textured backgrounds. Something that adds to the picture. I don’t find white backgrounds that interesting, but that’s just my opinion.

I feel sometimes I’m too verbose with my reviews. I often skip to the end of some reviews and read the pictures. Sometimes the graphs are hard for me top interpret. I like nice easy pictures.

I often wish I had better equipment. Like a nice DSLR, and something to measure lumens… but I don’t buy near as many lights as most of the people here so I don’t know how often I’d use an integrating sphere.

Djozz brings up a good point, resizing the photo to a small enough size that still shows good detail. I do this with 95% of my photos in my PhotoBucket account. I find that simply opening the original camera download photo and then clicking Save (to overwrite) is often enough to drop the file size 50%. A good free photo editor is Irfanview and it supports batch processing of multiple files. I dislike reviews that take forever to load the photos (though that could be the host too).

-Garry

Yep, Gary. I post a smaller version. Flickr gives you many many size options. I used to post much larger pictures but I find that, that was probably irritating.

@ Djozz, yes, thats what I meant... Styrofoam... the good thing is that its not shiny, and therefore diffuses the light.

Resize your pictures in only 2 clicks!

Install Photoresize and set it up with your desired settings.

Once you`ve installed it, you can go to any pic and click Right mouse button, and choose Resize picture...

that`s it..

This saves upload time, and eventually saving time to through different options in Flickr etc before you get your desired size.

Not going into details of how this program works, please read the website.
Any computer will be able to use it.
Once you set it up, you can resize any pic in 2 clicks.

I'm working at this too. I have two reviews in progress, and I'm trying to create a sort of template to follow with additional reviews.

The picture thing is still messing me up. I don't have enough windows to take good pictures inside. I tried going outside a few times, but it's so breezy that it's blowing my lightbox around. So I'm trying to get the lighting and exposure right for indoor photography. Photo editing is another big thing, especially since I rarely get anywhere near perfect shots straight out of the camera. I need to use RAW more so there's more color information to allow me to shift white balance and such in the editing software and still have a good picture. When I use a white background, I want the background to disappear. This is proving difficult. It'll probably be easier to use textured backgrounds.

Measurements will be something I'll be working on for a very long time. I need to acquire both the skills and the tools. I'll probably go back and update reviews over time.

As others said, the type of review you do depends on how you use your flashlight. I use mine primarily for hiking.

I can start off with the first impression type of review that flashlights always get, and then I can come back and add extra measurements and a long term review.

+1 8)

XnView is awesome for batch conversions too. That's what I use for batch editing when I prepare scanned books for OCR. I prefer Gimp when I can focus on one file at a time. Both are free.

How about PWM?

I usually find it interesting to know how fast/slow the PWM is.

I set up my camera on a tripod, and set the shutter speed to 1sec. plus a 2 seconds timer.

I quickly move the light in front of the camera.

This way you can see if it has a high PWM or not. It can be pretty useful to compare it with other well known lights.

Raw is overrated! Ok maybe it’s not, but I’ve found that you can tweak the color just about anyway you want in photoshop even if it’s not in raw. And I literally adjust the color and detail on every single photograph I upload, and I have a crappy point and shoot.

I like that everyone has their own review style. I don’t enjoy reviews that feel like there is no personality speaking to me. I like some diversity too, I like to hear about various user experiences and applications. I also like some comparative data.

My own experience reviewing here; I tried using the template but found it too limiting for my style. I try to make nice, clear photos.

I have noticed a trend in tech reviews lately to shoot dark things like black flashlights and knives in front of a black background. Please don’t do this (unless the object is very light and doesn’t show well against a white background)! >.<

I used to be more fussy about photos and would Photoshop things before uploading but now I just try to shoot as best I can and just upload. I am lucky with my window positioning that it gets good usable light pretty much all day.

I prefer to shoot with a white background for good contrast and sense of space. I set custom white balance with a white background and upload to Google Picasa. There, it automatically resizes and compresses, but I still can download the original large JPEG file if I ever need it.

I`m gonna upload a review soon.. not finished yet.. but concentrated most on pictures ;)

I’m more of a “touchy feely” reviewer, not much tech stuff(amp, voltage, etc.).
A lot more “How would this perform in the real world”? :smiley:
Here I dropped a flashlight on a tiled floor and dropped it in a bowl of water:

In this review, I rode my bike for almost 4 hours in the rain:

Thanks guys for all the suggestions and ideas.

I`m looking for a link/picture.

I want to measure the Amps. on a flashlight while the battery is installed, to see how many amps the light draws from the battery.
Do you guys just put magnets on the negative of the battery and the negative wire from the DMM?

and then let the light run, and write down the amps every 5 mintues or so?

or is there something that you can connect to your computer so that it will make a graph on its own?

You can get DMM's with computer connection, this makes it considerable easier to log the data (Just sit back and let the computer do the work).

But there is another problem, that is getting a low enough voltage drop through the test leads and the DMM.