By CHARLES TASHIRO
Photography and videography are powerful tools to capture those holiday moments that we treasure over time. The results often disappoint, however, because the execution does not equal the events’ emotional importance.
That’s because as powerful and easy to use as cameras have become, they are still tools that need operator assistance.
Their very ease of use can mislead people into thinking that success is guaranteed. However, there are a few steps you can take to help you make the technology work for you.
Start by confirming the “white balance” has been set correctly. “White balance” is the technical term referring to the color temperature (or bias) of the medium. This is what you’re adjusting when you flip a switch that says “daylight,” or “tungsten,” et cetera. Daylight is slightly blue, incandescent light is slightly red, fluorescents a little green. If you shoot with the wrong setting, the results will look unnatural.
Most cameras can set this automatically but it’s a good idea to pay attention to this issue and set the camera manually; many situations will provide a mixture of light sources, and you have to decide which should be primary.
Then, think about the lighting. There are several misconceptions about lighting that can impact your video.
First, flooding the scene with light is not good lighting. Uniform light assures that everything is visible, but the results are usually bland and uninteresting. You should use lighting (and color) selectively, to emphasize some things while letting relative darkness obscure the unimportant. (And do not use an in-camera flash as anything other than an absolute last resort. The results are always garish and amateurish.)
Keep in mind that the automatic light meters in cameras easily make mistakes. The most common of these occurs when the subject is backlit (i.e., the primary illumination is behind the subject). The meter will read for the bright light, and as a result the subject will be underexposed. You can overcome this problem by taking your light meter reading on the subject’s face. This will assure a proper exposure of what you’re trying to capture but it will also mean that the areas behind the subject will be overexposed.
One way to get around this problem is to position the lights or the subject or yourself in relation to them in a way that the light levels do not vary enough to produce this problem. Of course, you often do not have control over the lighting, and you don’t want to interfere with the spontaneity of the moment by asking people to wait while you set up lights.
There’s no perfect way around this dilemma but paying attention to the surroundings and anticipating where things might go can help to minimize the most awkward lighting situations. The good news is that the light sensitivity of camcorders and phone cameras give you a lot of options.
Just as it is tough for you to control the lighting when shooting, it is even more difficult to know what your subjects will be doing and where they will go, so people will often do their best to move around to follow the action, with a lot of restless camera motion resulting. This is one of the most common misconceptions about video and home movies. In fact, professionally produced films and video often do not have much movement, and what there is is highly planned and controlled. You should follow that example and avoid the roving camera that is the curse of many home movies.
Once you have settled on a camera position, stay put. Move only when your subjects do. Avoid panning the camera left and right or tilting up and down unless there is something in the shot to motivate the movement. Remember, movement in itself is not particularly interesting and often distracting.
Keep your focus, in other words, figuratively and literally. Most current cameras have an automatic facial recognition system that will choose your plane of focus based on the presence of a human face. But the facial recognition software can be fooled by things that broadly resemble a face. And of course, there may be situations in which you are less interested in a face than something else.
The other limitation imposed by automatic focusing is that, unless you are shooting with a DSLR camera, using prime (i.e., non-zoom) lenses, you cannot change the plane of focus in the middle of a shot (called “rack” focusing). While doing so is a relatively unusual technique, it is a powerful way to manipulate the “depth of field” (not be confused with “depth of focus”), which denotes the range of space in acceptable focus.
Depth of field fluctuates depending on the amount of light, the size (focal length) of the lens and the sensitivity of the sensor or film stock. (Basic rule: long lens + low light = shallow depth of field; short lens + bright light = deeper depth of field.)
Since home movie shooting doesn’t give you much control over light, and since the sensor is built into a digital camera, that leaves only the focal length of the lens to manipulate depth of field. Unfortunately, phone cameras’ focal length is usually fixed. Their “zoom” creates a digital enlargement of the image, not a true optical movement into a space, and thus produces pixelated images the more the subject is enlarged.
Camcorders provide the greater flexibility of true zoom lenses. But even they rarely provide the ability to rack focus. The automation in all these devices is purchased at the price of manual control. Just be aware, then, that the lighting and what you choose as the subject will affect the depth of field and thus how much of the image will be in focus.
Combined with some advanced planning, keeping these basic concepts in mind can make a big difference. And if you want to improve the results even more, be prepared to edit them.