We like it when things are framed. It draws our interest and tells us where to focus our eyes. Doorways and windows make natural and obvious frames; train yourself to look for them in other places, too, like the crook of someone's arm or the arch of a ladder.

This is a very important technique in making your images look professional. Depth of field is defined as the area in front of your camcorder that appears in sharp focus. This means that if you have a shallow depth of field, the foreground and background of your video will be out of focus when your subject appears sharp in the frame. Conversely, when you have a deep depth of field, elements in the foreground and background will appear in sharper focus along with your subject. You can control depth of field with your camcorder in several ways, but by far the most important of these is the aperture, or iris, setting. Small aperture settings (those with a large f-stop number, such as f22) have a very deep depth of field, whereas large aperture settings (with the smaller numbers, like f2.8) have a very shallow depth of field. If you don't have the ability to control the aperture on your camcorder, you can trick your camera into thinking that it's darker by putting a "neutral density" filter in front of the lens. This forces the camcorder's automatic exposure system to open up the aperture a bit to compensate. Basically, a neutral density filter is just like the lens in a pair of sunglasses: it doesn't change the color, it just makes things appear darker, tricking the auto-exposure system accordingly.

One thing that's worse than a static shot on a tripod is a static shot on a tripod that zooms in and out. Zoom in, cut away to something else, zoom out. Unless your zoom is for effect, cover it up with a cutaway.

This doesn't mean jerky, random, shaky camera work, which we see plenty of, but rather a smoother, more standard kind of camera move. Two basic camera movements are trucking and dollying. A dolly shot moves the camera in and out, towards or away from the subject, while trucking is moving the camera left or right while keeping it perpendicular to your subject. Try shooting out of a slow-moving car window (as a passenger, of course; don't shoot while driving!) to track a moving subject, such as a jogger. Try moving through a crowd to create a "you are there" feeling.

Get down on the ground and shoot up, or put your camera on a monopod and hold it way over your head for an aerial perspective. Consider using staircases, ladders, or the upper story windows of buildings for vantage points to shoot from. Unusual perspectives can be intercut with more standard views to break up the monotony of a single shot.

When you're watching television or movies, become aware of the production. How long does a director stay on a shot before they cut away to something else? How do they use establishing shots and cutaways to keep the audience interested? Where was the camera? Learning the visual vocabulary of video goes a long way toward learning how to effectively use it. At the same time, look critically at the video productions of your peers. Where do they succeed? Where do they fail? And why? Each time you notice and understand a new technique, you can add it to your repertoire.