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.