ISOrelated questions - YOUR help is needed!

Off-topic Chatter
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YOUR opinion is highly appreciated
take 4 minutes to watch the video and another to comment your thoughts and wishes!
www.youtube.com/embed/jEBe0pe6EmY

since my english seems not to be clear...
i have no problem with my work (in principle) ;)
my question is : what do you think about people posting faked or missleading pictures...
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Misleading photos or ads are everywhere. Cars included. The bottom of the screen during a car ad says something like “this car is special blah blah not a normal production car.” This is no different from faked photos here, there isnt a standard in place.

Someome can mess with photo settings to make any light look impressive, thats typical of a.e.

What sets you guys apart is the familiar settings, locations, and decipherable reviews. Us muggles notice this.

How often do you see the post that starts with “after x many tactical lights that are all junk, im here to find xxx light for xx purpose” or ” im tired of wasting money.” How else did they end up here?

Some people wont ask, Some like me, lurk and read reviews. After 3 or 4 reviews on here i can compare photos and likes/dislikes and feel i know enough to purchase said light and be happy with it, or move on. A few flashlight searches later, you acquire a feeling when someone is trying to sell you a light, and not just review it.

Flashlight reviews and more recently for me- review videos from you or vestureofblood, orall those in-depth posts from hkj or djozz, toykeeper, just to name a few, are taken as concrete evidence to me. What you say goes.

I see Consistant (time intensive) hard work, that is most likely costing you money. to me that is still a hobby. Hobby means something I want to do.

Someone is going to go further with something if its a hobby and not a forced decision (or forced review in this case).

And screw English. Ive been speaking it for 31 years, andi still suck at it. Fret not! Words may not be universal but Lumens are my friend.

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:beer:

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On a now-defunct weather site, I used to post pix, and people would always piss’n’moan because I stripped the EXIF from the uploaded photo (default setting on editing it in any way).

Well, duh, if I’m taking a shot of a bird in flight, and have to crop the image to less than a third its original area because the bird was so far away, “300mm” is meaningless, as the equivalent lens would be 1000mm or more.

Same with autoexposure that was “off” somewhat, and I’d bring the gamma up or down to make it a better shot. Shutter speed would then be meaningless.

But then, the goal was to have a “pretty” picture, not absolute accuracy.

Photos would almost always have to be taken in manual mode to compare the control shot, light A, light B, low mode, medium mode, etc. And turbo might just saturate the sensor at the brightest points. (I learned early on to keep an EV setting of –0.7 or so, especially when snapping pix of white flowers. Unlike film, which saturates slowly, a sensor will hard-clip at 100%, so the flower would be blown out to solid white at EV = 0.0, but still show nice “graininess” in the petals at EV = –0.7 or lower.)

Videos, forget it, they auto-adjust (you can see the beam stay more or less the same but the surrounding areas of the shot get darker and darker as the brightness of the light goes up and up).

What’s funny(?) is that in my case, I can make a pic look pretty, artistically, but can’t for the life of me get decent beamshots. Just comparing a ~6000K light and ~3000K light, a side-by-side white-ceiling shot, the beams looked almost identical except for a slight difference in color around the edges of the hotspot. I was too embarrassed to even post ’em.

Maybe it’s because I’m taking those shots on my phone instead of my “real” camera, dunno. I wouldn’t even know where to start to get accurate videos.

I say just keep doing what you’re doing. Manually reciting the settings is a great idea. Can’t tell you how many times I deviated from my “comfortable” camera settings for some shots, and forgot to reset them to normal, ruining a whole bunch of pix in the process.

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I make no video’s but I do post beamshots every now and then, the problem is not really different. I make them with my phone, and on the spot I adjust the brightness of the picture on my phone screen to what I see with my eyes. It helps that on the little square where I live, where I usually make the shots, there’s streetlamps for a constant background, so that controls and shots with a beam in it can be adjusted to the same exposure.
When I transfer the picture to my tablet or computer, the visual brightness is a bit different again, it is never exact, but it stays close enough that I think it remains a fair representation of reality.

For me it is important to get it right, I do not care for pretty pictures that have no relation to reality.

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Misleading photos and specs are everywhere. Unless I have a good understanding of the product I’m looking at then photos are just a general idea. Even when the photos are done ‘right’ with corrected white balance or whatever they are still just an idea for me partially because I know very little about photography. The best reference for me is side by side beamshots with well known flashlights. I might’ve posted more beamshots but I know some people like the shots to be in accordance with (….yada yada yada…) so they can reference ‘true colours’ etc…. On a side note I can’t believe how much discussion goes on about colour and tint on blf. I understand it’s a prominent point to flashaholics but everyone’s phone or pc screen is different so in no way can a single perfect shot be displayed perfectly to a whole internet audience.

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Bump.

C’mon guys, 5 replies….???!! How many of you have used madm4x deals?

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It would be great if there were “standards” in taking pictures maybe a set of parameters to put on the camera / smartphone before taking the picture. I think most reviewers have trouble setting the correct parameters in their imaging devices to make a picture show most accurately what is seen in real life.

Anyone want to take a jab in what parameters should be standard in taking pictures of beamshots, night shots etc? ISO, Aperture, shutter, etc

I would love to have some parameters to take pictures myself.

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I think it is good enough if the picture just made is compared to reality and either the exposure settings are adjusted until it looks the same on screen, or afterwards the picture on screen is corrected.

Setting the expose correct is easy, and important for correct interpretation, but getting tints right on screen is an illusion, people should not bother too much about that, choose a whitebalance setting that is approximately correct and be done with it.

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you can try "open camera" on Android phones

easy to fix exposure even in videos

at least a big improvement when comparing 2 or more flashlights