Originally Posted by
Sir Bikesalot
Can you take some beamshots at night with your setup? I have a Fenix L2D CE that I wanted to use as my sole light, but found it too much of a spot light. I was thinking two would give a good spread, but decided to go with a 25W halogen instead and use the L2D on my helmet.
Yeah, I'd like to do that. It ought to be pretty easy to compare the one L2D versus two L2D setup.
But I do wonder about how people do visually "objective" shots comparing various lights. I need to read more on that (that is, how people who have done comparisons previously have gone about doing them).
As a photographer, my concern would be to try and accurately control exposure and not let the camera do anything to automatically adjust based on the amount of light it perceives from one light to the next. Seems like the only way you could do comparative shots is to use the same shutter speed and f-stop for every shot and then to be very cautious about carefully controlling your image editing programs (like Photoshop) after the fact so that exposure compensation on the image editing side doesn't interfere with as true a representation of the brightness as possible. (I mean, if someone did so intentionally or accidentally, they could make a bright light look dim and a dim light look bright.) As long as variables are not allowed to change at the time of exposure, something that shows a reasonable comparison could be done. But, if the camera is allowed to control any of it (that is, with auto-anything), results would not be very valid, I don't think. And to top all that off, EVERY computer monitor will show brightness, contrast, color differently. Seems like it would be actually very difficult to show via the Internet what someone is actually seeing with the human eye. That's a lot of possible points of variation -- in the camera, in the editing program, on the individual monitor where final image is viewed.
I dunno, maybe my speculation is making it more complex than it is in reality, but is seems like my concerns would be mostly valid (in terms of accuracy of final displayed images in any case).
Seems interesting. Not something I've ever needed to do or tried to do, but I think it would make an interesting experiment. Just wish I had more lights to compare. But once again, the one L2D versus two L2D should be pretty easy, in general. Maybe I can do that tonight.