What settings to take beamshot pics?

[rycen]

I have a canon A410 and was wondering what seting to use to take some beamshot pics.

 

[Lexus]

Use manual settings:

- low ISO to avoid noise
- set whitebalance to daylight
- for aperture, I use 2.8
- long exposure time, try starting with 1s
- use a tripod
- disable flash

 

[Thujone]

i set up my tripod and light stand then allow my camera to auto shoot my brightest light that will be in the group. Then lock those settings into the camera. That keeps you from having any clipping on the bright side. As the camera already chose proper exposure for your brightest light.

 

[rycen]

Do these look ok?

QIII with R123A

Mag LED 3AA,tight focus

 

[woodrow]

They look good to me. If I am taking pics of over 100 luman lights, I might go down to 1/2 to 1/4 sec depending on distance.

 

[Lexus]

Sure they do! :goodjob:
They give a good impression of beam color and hotspot/spill ratio. Digicams lack the dynamic range of our eyes. It's hard to capture hotspot and spill in the same shot without the hotspot being overexposed. Tint is also exaggerated quite a bit in most shots. Our brain does a lot of realtime image postprocessing, which a digicam doesn't do. Good beamshots, especially outdoor shots can be a lot of work, if done properly.

 

[cratz2]

Yeah, I've been using 28mm, f2.8 and 1 second for a while now. My newest camera, a Canon A430 doesn't do 2.8 @ 28mm, it does 2.6 so that is what I will go with from now on.

On outdoor shots, if you want to show the size and relative brightness of the spillbeam, I step up to 2 seconds.

 

[Illum]

it doesnt matter which setting you put it on, just as long as you can differentiate beetween hotspot and spill...
most important thing is to keep all of your beamshots on the same setting...so shooting them in auto in distance shots doesnt really tell anything