This week is where I’m really beginning to get excited about this class. While the previous two weeks were spent largely going over fundamental concepts of camera and lighting work that I was in large part already rather familiar with – this week we have finally begun to enter more uncharted territory for me. In particular I found learning about the use of the Zebra function to be extremely helpful for me. I have known for a long time that this functionality was available in most cameras but I didn’t really know what it specifically did or how to use it. In particular, knowing that setting the zebra to display on 70% luminosity will allow me to correctly expose for caucasian skin tones is an incredibly helpful piece of information which I will absolutely be putting into practice next time I’m operating a camera under applicable conditions.
Overall I was happy enough with our exercise from this week (referring to take 3). I filled the role of DP/Camera Operator so naturally I am going to nitpick the camera work a bit, but the main thing I did notice was that the camera movement was not great – a bit ‘janky’ I would say. I was happy with the framing and the staging of the action in between the camera movement but I did find the shakiness of it – despite being on a tripod, to be rather distracting. One aspect of the movement I was happy with though is the way the camera movement is motivated – it doesn’t move until Barney noticed Rachel approaching. This was something we had noticed wasn’t working in the first couple takes and altered for the final take. Another technical aspect I was unhappy with was the focus – the shot at any given moment is far too soft. I don’t know if I hadn’t setup my viewfinder correctly or if I just wasn’t paying enough attention but that is definitely an area for improvement.
I was happy enough with the lighting. We ended up just placing a bounce to the left of frame to try to balance the foreground with the background – which I think is serviceable enough given the objective of the exercise, though still doesn’t look incredible. I also appreciate the way the practical light on the wall behind the subjects is creating a sort of backlight or hairlight which is helping create some separation between the subjects and the background – though I do think this would look better if the colour balance had been set to a more neutral point and it wasn’t such a warm orange colour (my bad!).