Hello everyone, everything is fine?
Some years ago, I bought a Sofirn sp32a to help me in my adventures when I went camping, and it had a nice performance.
However, I went to a hobby of birdwatching, and, after some time, I tried to go birding in the night. In this moment, I realized that my flashlight was too open, and wasn’t able to light a owl 5-10 meter away, to the point that my camera can’t focus, because it was too dark.
A friend of mine uses a flashlight extreme budget, almost $8 (R$35), with 260 lumens, but is very bright and focus, way better than my sofirn ($25) in this purpose. I imagine that this difference is because the format of the head.
Someone can recommend me wich flashlights will attend my specic demand? Infortunately, here in Brazil, the dolar is so expensive, so I only can buy from China platforms, like Aliexpress, and above $30.
For photography you want a flashlight with a high CRI LED so that the colours of the birds are rendered beautifully and life-like.
My suggestion would be a New Emisar D1 mini pocket thrower - LED Flashlights with B35AM or 519A LED.
These will produce enough high quality light with at least 50m usable (for photography) range.
Hi Reinaldo! Welcome to the forum. I am not posting here anymore, but I had to come back to recommend against pointing a flashlight at a bird. I say this as a person who has done quite a bit of bird research as a volunteer for the U.S. National Park Service, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service, including trapping and banding raptors. Birds have very sensitive eyes. They also need their eyesight to survive, and being blinded, even for a second, can interfere with their hunting, nesting, mating, and young-rearing activities. That can be fatal. It can also distract them when a predator or a natural obstacle or hazard might endanger their lives.
Especially for nocturnal or crepuscular animals, even a small, unnatural increase in light can blind and disable the animal, with fatal results for them or their young or mates. Please consider using only natural light to photograph wild animals, out of respect for the animals. Thank you for considering my comments, and good luck with your birding and photography pursuits!
If you love owls, please don’t shine bright lights into their eyes, lights that are already coming with warnings against aiming them at another person and burning a hole into their retinas.
There is no reason why owls would like that treatment more than you or I would do.
