Backlighting is the sin of posing the subject (usually one or more people) in front of the sky or a ski slope or a body of water so that the important foreground is much darker than the unimportant background.

When this happens, the tiny brain of the camcorder's auto exposure system detects the bright background and sets the exposure for it instead of for your subjects. They become inky silhouettes.

Before you can take steps to prevent backlighting, you have to notice that it's happening; so, for goodness sake, study the image in your viewfinder. If it does not clearly show detail in people's faces or other important foreground elements, you've got yourself a bad case of backlighting.

You can fix backlighting by enabling the backlight compensation circuitry in your camcorder, or by lightening the foreground with reflector fill. But these solutions can be chancy for Getting Starters:

• Most backlight controls are unable to gauge the difference between background and foreground, so the amount of compensation is seldom accurate.
• Reflectors demand a modest amount of practice to master--though they are really easy, cheap, and fun to use.

No, the simplest solution to backlighting is to move camcorder and subjects until the foreground of your shot is at least as bright as the background. To eliminate sky, start by shooting from a higher camera position. At the beach, simply turn away from the glare off the water.

Motorzooming is the sin of, well, zooming. No matter how nifty your wide-range, multi-speed, auto- zoom feature may be, the fact is that on-screen zooms are a dull waste of viewer time and professionals don't use them except in two circumstances:

• Real-time coverage like news and sports, when the need to keep an image on the screen mandates zooming between compositions.
• Situations that require a progressive revelation of the image: The dark figure at the door pulls a sinister tool from her pocket. We zoom in to reveal that it is... her door key!

If you have a zoom lens, zooming is inescapable because it's the only way to change image size without physically moving forward or back. But plan your shots to eliminate these zooms. If editing in the camera, zoom to recompose your image between shots. If you're going to edit your footage later, zoom as quickly as possible between compositions, knowing that you'll leave the zooms on the cutting room floor.

Upstanding is the somewhat subtler sin of shooting everything from standing eye level, even though much of the world is better viewed from higher or lower angles.

So, as the man says, get down! Shoot children, pets, flowers, and other lowly critters from their own levels. All camcorders allow you to put the unit right on the ground and view the image by tilting the viewfinder upward.

Full-size VHS camcorders let you tilt the finder down as well. You can raise the camcorder high in the air for dramatic establishing shots and footage grabbed over the heads of crowds.

And even if the subject doesn't require it, a new angle makes a welcome change from the endless progression of eye-level shots.

Jogging is the sin of walking while shooting. Joggers give no thought to the fact that the image is bouncing around like a milk can in the bed of a Model T.

Moving shots are dramatic and exciting, so go for them! But to ensure that most of the movement is forward rather than up and down, observe these simple rules for hand-held shooting:

• Zoom the lens to its wide-angle setting to minimize shake. The telephoto position magnifies the jitters along with everything else.
• Don't touch the viewfinder with your forehead (a snap if you have an LCD screen finder).
• Walk with both knees and elbows bent so that your arms and legs act as natural shock absorbers.
• Move much more slowly than normal, so that the scene passing your lens has a chance to register with viewers.
• Pretend the camcorder you're carrying is a very full, very hot cup of coffee--and you'd better not spill a drop!

Are all seven camera sins equally deadly? Not really.

• Avoid firehosing and snapshooting and you'll upgrade your footage from unwatchable to presentable.
• Eschew headhunting and backlighting and you graduate from newbie status.
• Banish motorzooming, upstanding, and jogging and you'll find that without even noticing, you've become quite a skilled videographer.

Good shooting!