Is it possible I have a non-zoom through lenses. If so how do you tell the difference?
They come in two flavours. If it is not a zoom-through-lens adaptor, you will know as soon as you made your first zoom in – the image would beginning to look out of focus as you zoom in. Make certain that the adaptor is one that is designed to hold focus through the entire zoom range.
© 2013 Pieter de Vries ACSThese are always tricky lighting situations and the best approach is to keep it simple. I would suggest using a fluorescent light, a Lowel CaseLite or a Kino Flo Deva to provide the fill to even out the “toppy” overhead light from the existing flouros. A single light on a stand should not be too disruptive.
To add some punch to the sequence, shoot using the tele end of the zoom lens shots to bring the depth and the scope of the room into the sequence and rely on your light to take care of the close-up shots. The long telephoto shots will deliver the business of the room which surely is what the client would prefer. It's important to cut as much light from the LCD computer screens as you can, so a black cutter on a lighting stand may be helpful. This may not work as your impact will be bigger and it may impede the operation of the office. To get a nicer balance, turn down the brightness of the computer LCD screens. With LCD screens you will not have to deal with roll bar issues .
Tracking shots will do justice to the sequence and the office. The repetitive set-up of many office cubicles and work stations is appealing so don't attempt to light these shots.
It's best to not over complicate however a gentle fill from a flourescent light may be needed. Use your fill light at a low output setting or move it away from the subject to find the right balance. Daylight tubes should be fitted in this situation.
If a light on a lighting stand is not practical then a Lite-Panel LED battery operated camera light is the next step. The dimmer on the panel will allow you to set just enough fill to clean up the toppiness from the overhead house lights. Check first that you have a reasonable colour match with the existing lights. Add a sheet of Rosco Half Plus Green to the Lite Panel or the CaseLight add green in order match the green colour cast in the overheads; make it everything greenish – remove this overall cast in your NLE and the colour will look quite normal again. Some testing would be good if you have the time.
In summary, use gentle light fill for faces and use your flouro to back-light mouse and keyboard shots. Rely on long lens to create busy foregrounds, and dolly shots: a Wally Dolly or even someone pushing you on a rolling office chair.
Frame faces with the computer screens breaking up the frame. Half face – half back of the screen and organise lots of stuff hopefully moving through the foreground.
© 2013 Pieter de Vries ACS
Getting good results shooting outdoors on a bright day is a challenge. Video just looks better when you don’t have to work in the glare of the sun. You’ll need some basic sun controlling tools to make it work or your scene could end up looking like Funniest Home Videos.
Shoot your wide shots early in the morning and from a position where the sun is lighting the scene from one side; side light will get the precious light and shadow happening.
You may end up shooting medium/dialogue shots and close-up/dialogue shots in the middle of the day. This is not too bad as you can use an overhead diffusion panel to shoot the closer shots. You’ll also need reflectors; some means of evening up the deep shadow areas. Use the white side to bounce light into backlit faces.
As mentioned, part of your sun controlling tools should be an overhead shade cloth and some means of suspending it over the actor/subject for close-ups and medium shots where there’s harsh full sunlight falling on faces. A overhead silk that allows most of the sunlight through (half stop or full stop) is best, otherwise it looks like your actors are performing in an unseen mystery poolside pergola!
Make sure that the backgrounds are not too bright. A small left or right shift of your camera to a position where there are trees behind for example is often enough to give you the best overall balance in this situation.
A 6 foot X 6 foot scrim/silk or very light sail cloth clipped into a frame is the ideal tool. You can then use reflectors to bounce light into the faces with a direct solid kick off the sun to continue that sunny feel. Late afternoon or early morning light is very flattering, and using this direct front light is the way to go, so don’t be afraid to shoot without reflectors and scrims at this time.
White balance your camera from time to time and if you choose to continue shooting when the odd cloud rolls over, make sure that you balance to that quality of light. I do a manual white balance in full sun (“B” position) and a balance in cloud cover (“A” position) and switch between the two as needed – The Z1 has this feature. This will help to disguise the impact of totally different light colour and totally different light characteristics.
Finally, try to position the camera further back from the subject and shoot your close-ups on the telephoto end of the zoom and use the built-in ND filters to get you an aperture of around f5.6. This will give you some nice focus fall off behind and in general, be more flattering, especially if your have the light falling on your subject under control.
I hope for an overcast day when I have to shoot outside. In the filtered and indirect soft light video still looks vibrant and in some cases more colourful than in full sun, and the evenness of this light makes it easier to get through the shots. Wide shots do look better in sunlight, you just have to reign-in the harshness of the sun by trying some of the ideas suggested. As a last thing, make sure the sun doesn’t hit the front glass of lens. There is no need to highlight every particle of perfectly focus dust sitting on the front lens element.
© 2021 Pieter de Vries ACS
Finding a location where your subject has lots of space behind is the easiest way to get the look that you are after. This is because it's not always easy to set the camera a long distance from the subject.
The best way to achieve this look is to set a good distance from the subject. Here are some things to keep in mind.
If the best place is the lounge room, use a sofa or lounge chair; it’s a natural place to sit and tend to make it look a little less staged.
If the sofa is positioned against a wall, slide it out and ask them to sit at one end turned, with their back facing more towards the background rather than the back of the sofa.
A high back on a chair can also be unfortunate so in this case, position the camera so that you’re shooting along the length and looking into the background. A cushion placed into the corner will make them more comfortable and less likely to slump.
If it’s an office situation and there’s only office chairs in abundance, then preferably use one that has arm rests, doesn’t swivel and doesn’t have a high back – again, you need to see as much as you can into the background.
Place the chair about three meters from your camera position, turn it so that it’s orientated at around 30 degrees to the camera. When your subject is seated, this easily turns the shoulders so that they’re not square on in the frame, looking a bit like the coat hanger. There’s a few other reasons why this orientation works.
The subject is now able to look comfortably to the interviewer without having to turn their head; they’re already facing them. Your interviewer must be positioned in a similar chair around the same height and be close to the camera. It’s critical that you see both eyes of your subject, so an eye-line just off the camera-line is perfect. This makes an engaging interview.
Look for a place in a room where there’s space and depth behind. Sliding a sofa to a position where you can see deep into the rest of the room is the best idea. One reason for doing this is to take advantage of this distance behind by framing your subject on a longer lens. This will give you a beautifully defocused background. This approach will also give you the space to hide a kick-light and a background light.
As part of your background choice, look for an area of the room that reveals to your audience some clues about your subject. A bookcase full of books or sideboard displaying photographs is good value, and you’ll be able to use them as a way to balance the overall composition. An interview has to be well framed – you can spend a lot of time look at them.
Don’t ever be happy to settle for a position where your subject is seated with a wall immediately behind.
© 2013 Pieter de Vries ACS
Supplementary lens adaptors are designed to supplement the existing optical range of the built-in zoom. They widen the field of view through out the entire zoom range. I is not technically easy for a zoom lens to perform brilliantly at the telephoto-end of the zoom at any time.
Adding a piece of glass designed to widen the field of view makes this task even harder as you extend the zoom to try an magnify the image. Without the wide angle adaptor on the front, you do not have to stretch the zoom so far. This is why you had a disappointing result.
© 2013 Pieter de Vries ACS
Make an improvised stand for your material on a table and lean the "stand" back to around 45 degrees. I use a large coffee table book as a backing board leaning it back against other coffee table books or a couple of telephone books (good for something these days). The photos should rest nicely here with the odd strip of gaffer tape on the back to prevent them slipping.
The camera should be on your tripod set to a distance that allows you to focus without having to turn the focus ring all the way to minimum focus. You need some focus breathing room. Camera should be set to a height that results in the picture having even focus from top to bottom. It’s better to be seated behind the camera as these can turn into long sessions – be comfortable so you can make accurate camera moves over small areas. It's very demanding at these high magnification levels.
In the case of photos, you need to frame your shots WITHIN the photo. Don’t reveal the edges of the photos as this takes away any atmosphere that images evoke. Frame a shot that takes in as much of the photo as the wide 16:9 permits and shoot a static shot for a minimum of twelve seconds. This amount of time allows for dissolves and narration. Factor this in as you can always chop it in the edit. Lock the pan and tilt on the tripod so there is absolutely zero camera movement. Happy with this shot? Now explore the detail in the photograph by panning from say, face to face – tilting up from shoes to faces or moving slowly across landscapes to reveal something interesting or a feature in the landscape.
Zooms work well here too and as you pull out, don’t be too concerned that you’ll reveal the edges of the prints as you can reverse the shot later or dissolve out before you reach the end of the zoom. When you’re shooting, try to imagine how the shot might be used. Think of the mood as you record as this is where the a lot of impact can be set in place. Do the moves at two speeds.
Lighting should be flat on photos and bright enough to get you a camera aperture of around f5.6. A light on each side of the camera at the similar angle; about 45 degrees. If there is a flare from a light on a glossy print, move it further away from the camera to the side (almost reaching 90 degrees to the camera) but at the same time make sure you don’t introduce unwanted shadows into the print. This is caused by the photo not being completely flat. Some old photographs are a bit curly.
Set the lights so that one of them is skimming along the paper at an angle of almost 90 degrees . As opposed to the advise above, this creates shadows in any minor ripples in the paper itself and gives it real texture rather than looking like computer generated graphic of some sort. Switch the camera to a warm colour balance – light it with tungsten lamps and set the camera to a daylight (outside) white balance. This will “brown up” the newspaper and give it an old newspapery look. Cutting light off other areas of the newspaper will draw the audience into the part of the text you want them to notice.
Pan or tilt up out of black to reveal the text or even a photo on the page. In other words, find your shot, focus, set aperture, then look for somewhere to come out of to reveal. Out of black is always a winner. The magic of this becomes apparent when you add music or narration. You must imagine the mood and motive of what you are doing right here and now. It will pay off later.
Television screens. Set the white balance to a daylight setting. Most TV screens output at daylight and this records as a blue tint if the camera is set to tungsten or inside. Tempting as the TV is usually inside, but just set the camera to daylight and it will look normal I promise.
Pieter de Vries ACS
For a night shoot, often full of mixed light sources, use the pre-set tungsten/indoor camera setting. This will cover you for the lighting nasties that can play in the scene and it will look the most natural.
If you shoot under fluorescents lights at night, do a manual balance only if you have to shoot a scene with fluorescents as the main illumination and be aware that doing this can send other (non-flouro) lights in the scene slightly off colour. In general, I prefer to make my own white balance under fouros.
© 2013 Pieter de Vries ACS {modal http://www.youtube.com/embed/tENZDoj5MTg|width=560|height=315|title=Learn all about What? Nothing!}Youtube video{/modal}On the Sony PMW-EX1R and some other digital video cameras, you must be sure that ALL OF THE MANUAL ADJUSTMENT icons are active if you want to have full manual control over your camera.
Iris, Gain, Shutter Speed and White balance settings and icons must all be in seen along the bottom of the screen. Do this by pushing the corresponding Iris, Gain, Shutter Speed and White balance buttons on the camera.
The camera software assumes that any parameter that you don't see on the screen must be automatically adjusted by the camera. For example, if you have all of these settings active except the GAIN, the camera will automatically make a gain level adjustment for you when the picture is too dark. Even though you have control of the IRIS, it appears to be adjusting the light level automatically when panning to dark area of the scene.
It's not the IRIS that is automatically adjusting here, it's the GAIN.
Finally, remember, "locking" the manual adjustments by sliding the switch to the HOLD position locks out ALL the adjustments, including the iris, which is the one thing that you usually need to have control over.
© 2013 Pieter de Vries ACS
Photographic tripods consist of two primary parts – a tripod and a fluid head, however it is common to refer to the whole unit as a tripod or a tripod system.
To get precision pans and tilts, you have to take the time to balance the camera once it is mounted on the fluid head. Australian manufacturer Miller Camera Support design and build a broad range of tripod systems so I will discuss the Miller DS10 Carbon Fibre system here.
As an on-camera light, the Lite-Panel LED is hard to go past. 
The ability to trim the brightness for any given lighting situation is important and this light allows you to do that. The daylight balanced 50 degree model works best as an on-camera light in my experience.
Use a piece of CTO correction gel for the tungsten lighting situations but you will loose some output as you'd expect. It's perfect for a night shoot inside a car and the wider beam of the two is more versatile.
Rosco LitePads also work nicely and have the ability to fix any lighting holes; those places where you find hard hide a light. Interior scenes in vehicles at night are nicely taken care of with LitePads along with so many other potentially tricky situations. These are my favourite light because of the different shapes and sizes that are available.
The great thing is that when you use it, nothing feels lit. It just appears like you've gotten lucky with soft natural available light every where you point the camera and we all know life's not really like that. It's the balance of light's output on the subject compared to the background that's the key to making it work.
As long as you can get the light reasonably close to your subject, remembering that if it’s a daytime exterior interview it’s a little harder to fill; the ambient daylight level will probably be quite high in the first place. The small on-camera light panel is even good used as a key light in low ambient light situations. It’s in the great sunny outdoors that you find there is not sufficient output.
I’d go for the wider beam version. It performs better as an all round camera light, but you'll have to power it from a separate battery (9v to 19v) in say a waist bag, as the battery provided clips onto the back of the light and makes the camera far too top heavy. It's no Sun-Gun, but a beautifully subtle lighting tool for video.
© 2013 Pieter de Vries ACS