I was relieved when I first walked into the classroom and I saw a trolley with camera cases. Finally some practical work after purely theory filled first semester. After Robin familiarized us with the SONY EX3 Camera we left the classroom and started to shoot video. Our task was to go out an film something for 50 seconds with a fixed focal length of 12mm without any camera movement. This exercise was interesting as it caused us to carefully think about the perfect position to place and angle the camera to frame the shot we wanted, as there was no option to zoom or move the camera once we begun filming.

Another part of this exercise was to practice adjusting the IRIS to gain the perfect exposure with the addition of using the inbuilt Neutral Density filter to limit the light entering the lens. Furthermore, by taping off the zoom lens we were unable to zoom to a subject to accurately focus and would need to estimate the distance to gain clear focus. Luckily we wanted the whole frame to be in focus so we could just use a small aperture with a deep depth of field.

I learnt something very useful today and that is how to correctly calibrate the brightness and contrast settings on a video camera’s viewfinder. If the viewfinder settings aren’t what they should be then what you will see through the viewfinder may be significantly different to what the camera is recording.

For homework Mitch and I have to re-shoot the 50 second video by next weeks class. To improve on our first attempt we must be more careful with adjusting the exposure as our first clip was noticeably overexposed and our second clip underexposed. Its important that we remember that it’s always better to have a slightly underexposed image then an overexposed one as its easier to fix in post production.

Over and out,

Luke Egan