Want to do beamshots

I just bought my very first digital camera last week--a Samsung S860. I love this thing! Now I'm thinking of doing beamshots, which is different from normal picture-taking.

What F ratio and other settings are recommended to be used. I would like to make the beamshots look the same as they do in real life. But there seems to be a delicate balance in doing that. Any recommendations?

I'm experimenting with my Fujifilm Finepix S5600 in the same way - beamshots.

Right now I use full manual mode and set the aperture to a very high value to give a large depth-of-field (keeping as much as possible in focus), then I'll fire up some bright light, brighter than I'll be beamshotting and adjust the shutter speed until the camera exposure meter tells me the shot is properly exposed.

I'll keep those settings with a fixed white balance (I like to use the "daylight" one for beamshots at the moment but I'm experimenting!) and then start taking snaps! With fixed settings like this your camera will correctly show the difference between different brightness levels and lights.

Hope this helps, I'm an amateur too.

LEDrock said:

I just bought my very first digital camera last week--a Samsung S860. I love this thing! Now I'm thinking of doing beamshots, which is different from normal picture-taking.

What F ratio and other settings are recommended to be used. I would like to make the beamshots look the same as they do in real life. But there seems to be a delicate balance in doing that. Any recommendations?

Click to expand...

I'm in the same place....... never done beamshots but intending to try.

I'm going to look at as many beamshots posted by other people as I can find and take notes of what information they give about aperture settings, exposure times and ASA settings (or whatever they are called on digital cameras. And I think it's probably a good idea to keep detailed records of every shot and every change you make to exposure, aperture etc.

I've got a good digital camera because I have to illustrate my work and I've got a nice solid tripod, which is obviously an essential.

One of the big advantages of digitals is that you can see what you've got straight away, or at least as soon as the camera has finished processing it, so you can tell if you're anywhere near where you want to be.

Most of the good sets of beamshots that I've looked at start out by showing
the scene where you're going to shoot in daylight so that viewers, you included, can know what you can hope your beams to display.

Maybe some of the experienced beam-shooters can tell us whether any of this makes sense?

artec540 said:

I'm in the same place....... never done beamshots but intending to try.

I'm going to look at as many beamshots posted by other people as I can find and take notes of what information they give about aperture settings, exposure times and ASA settings (or whatever they are called on digital cameras. And I think it's probably a good idea to keep detailed records of every shot and every change you make to exposure, aperture etc.

Click to expand...

That data is contained within every jpeg file. It's called exif data.

I use an old cheap Kodak easyshare DX6340... it's a very consumer oriented camera and even the "manual" settings are limited.

I find that the best way to take beam shots on this camera, is to first make sure that the camera is on a steady tri-pod or base of sorts, then take some experimental shots to figure out what exposure length range will work well to see the light accurately without much or any over-exposure. Then I light up the target with something much brighter than I am shooting the shot with and hold the button partially down to let it focus, then turn that light off, then press the rest of the way and let it do it's thing. If I want the shots to really turn out nice, I'll also turn on the delay so that my pushing of the button doesn't cause any disturbance.

artec540 said:

I'm going to look at as many beamshots posted by other people as I can find and take notes of what information they give about aperture settings, exposure times and ASA settings (or whatever they are called on digital cameras. And I think it's probably a good idea to keep detailed records of every shot and every change you make to exposure, aperture etc.

Click to expand...

A further suggestion from Luke's point about EXIF data:

If you use the Firefox Browser, you can add an extension called "FxIF" which will allow you to right-click on web page images and retrieve the data. Keep in mind that this only works if the image file has not been stripped of it's EXIF data. An example would be where there are "composite" beamshots (side-by-sides) edited together into single images.

As an example, you can see this beamshot in one of selfbuilt's fine reviews. Although he has added the basic exposure info, the EXIF data is still retained in his file. If you right-click the image in Firefox, you'll see the following context menu:



Click the "Properties" item (highlighted above) and it will open a small image properties window. With the FxIF add-in, this info is expanded to include any embeded EXIF data, exactly what you are looking for:



As you can see, it includes not only the exposure information for the image, but details on when it was shot, whether a flash was used, his camera make and model, etc. etc. You can see that selfbuilt was using manual exposure control to make his images, as one would expect from this type of comparison work. The expanded properties information not only includes the EXIF info, but a handy "copy" button to copy the EXIF info into the clipboard if you wanted to compile this type of beamshot info by pasting it into another location.

EXIF data is extremely helpful in understanding the technical "recipe" for a photographer's work. To be honest, it's been so long since I used Internet Explorer, I can't speak to any capability there, but for sure this kind of function can be added to Firefox and I find it super helpful.

Never mind. I just tried posting only to read at the bottom of the screen where it says, "You may not post attachments". Geez! That really sucks!