Basic Training: 11 Steps to Add Some Spice to Your Video (page 2)

Wide-angle and telephoto lenses have other properties than simply making things look closer or farther away; they also change the apparent distance between objects. A wide-angle lens will seem to increase the distance between an object in the foreground and another in the background; likewise, a telephoto lens will compress the distance and make objects in the frame appear to be closer together.

It's common, for example, for movie makers to film dangerous looking car chases with a long telephoto lens to make the cars seem closer together, while in reality, there may have been thirty feet between the two cars in that "near miss." Wide-angle lenses will make objects close to the lens appear larger than objects further back. You could, for example, have a child in the foreground who appears taller than an adult several feet back.

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.

• Digg This!
• del.icio.us
• Technorati
• StumbleUpon
• Reddit