It’s the first week of class and I’ve already learnt so much. On Wednesday we learnt how to take apart and put together piece by piece a tripod.
I learnt about each element of a tripod.
- The spreader
- Telescopic legs
- Pan handle
- Tripod head (usually a ball joint that has a level and needs to be adjusted to be level whenever moved)
- Base plate
- That you can lock the pan and the tilt, as well as adjust the tension of each, allowing for very different changes in shots
And then there was the camera, the mammoth Sony EX3. Once you’ve found everything, it’s surprisingly straight forward, it can just be hard to find everything, so you really need to spend some time with the camera and explore its many various aspects.
We dug deep into the menus and not only learnt how to put the camera into the correct mode, adjusting the exposure to match the conditions, manually focussing, adjusting the focal point to the desired distance and depth of field. We also learnt all of the aspects of the camera, such as the ND filter which can also effect these manual aspects and the control we had over the camera, the Neutral Density filter effecting the exposure.
We went out to test our new found knowledge by taking two different shots of the same subject. Each shot had to be 50 seconds in length and we had to think carefully about when we pressed record. The second shot had to have one deliberate change in perspective in order to accentuate the focus or create a different feeling around the focus. We decided to film the on campus cafe, the first shot being a very symmetrical image. The second shot we decided to emphasise the people watching aspect and go from above our focus, creating a very creepy and perverted aura.
Overall the time we spent on the set up and decision of placement really added to the effectiveness of the shots.
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