Video Alfresco: A Guide to Easy Outdoor Shooting (page 2)

The availability of power indoors is not a major problem. When your batteries fail indoors, you can always use the A/C adapter. But A/C outlets are rarely available outdoors. And batteries rarely last as long as they should. With battery prices so high, one would hope to get a little more recording time for the money. But the reality is that the outdoor videographer must do whatever it takes to power his camcorder.

First, have enough batteries for the shoot, and make sure they're fully charged. Also, buy a device that will charge batteries or run your camera from a cigarette lighter. If you're going to do extensive outdoor shooting, look into one of the commercial battery packs that are available. You can often run your camcorder off of these belt packs with the same adapter you use to plug into your car's cigarette lighter.

Second, when using batteries, do what you can to increase their staying power. If shooting intermittently, use your camera's standby mode. Just get used to the amount of time needed to power-up and shoot. Also, use the manual focus whenever possible. Your camera's autofocus will eat up precious battery power and drastically reduce your shooting time. Many cameras have an "instant" focus button, allowing you to engage autofocus just long enough to set focus. This feature will save power.

Most light sources contain all the colors of the rainbow, but in different amounts. Incandescent bulbs give off more red light than blue light, so they have a reddish hue. Direct sunlight, on the other hand, has a bluish cast. On a street-scene shoot at dusk, for example, sunlight provides beautiful light for the shot. But as the sunlight fades, it's replaced by different colored light from nearby houses and streetlights. A color viewfinder might reveal the problem, but a black-and-white viewfinder won't. Even better than a color viewfinder is a small portable color monitor. If you can, carry one along and occasionally check the color of the scene you're about to shoot. Once you recognize the problem, you can attempt to correct it.

If a color problem does exist, the easiest way to correct it is to adjust your camcorder's white balance. White balance describes the way the camcorder interprets the colors in a light source. In order for your camera to render faithfully all of the colors it sees, you must adjust its white balance to match the predominant source of light in a given environment.

Virtually all camcorders have auto white balance. This feature continuously adjusts white balance while you shoot video, and produces reasonably good color. But unusual lighting conditions and mixed lighting conditions can sometimes fool your camcorder's automatic white-balance system. Many camcorders have selectable white-balance settings, and some have manual white-balance and white-balance lock. These are very useful tools. If your camcorder has them, master them.

Manual white balance is fairly easy to use. First, place a white card or other white surface in the same light as your subject. Then point the camera's lens at the card so the card fill's the camera's view. Finally, press and hold the camera's white-balance button for a few seconds. The camera's viewfinder will indicate when it has finished calibrating its white balance to the light source.

If you can't adjust your camcorder's white balance, or if there is mixed light in a scene, the easiest thing to do might be to just move the location of the shoot. With a little planning, you could work around the problem by scouting the location beforehand. If all else fails and you are forced to shoot in mixed lighting, try to keep the mix the same throughout the series of mixed-light shots.

Also keep in mind that you can deliberately misadjust your camera's white balance to create unusual color effects. If you white balance your camera to a particular color, the overall look of the shoot will change. For example, if you white balance on a blue card instead of a white one, your colors will tend to have a reddish cast. Experimenting with white balance can provide useful effects that you can creatively incorporate into your productions.

Depth of field is defined as the distance, measured from the camcorder's lens, from the nearest object that appears in sharp focus to the furthest object that appears in sharp focus. For example: focus on a flower six feet away from the camera. With either short depth of field or long depth of field, the flower itself will be in focus. But with a long depth of field, more of the foreground and the background will also be in focus. If you choose a short depth of field, the foreground and background will be out of focus.

The three parameters that control depth of field are the iris, the distance to the subject, and the focal length of the lens. The smaller the iris opening, the bigger the depth of field. The larger the distance to the subject, the bigger the depth of field. And the shorter the focal length of the lens, the larger the depth of field.

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