Video Production: Take a Hike

The background image on my computer is a still I grabbed from a home video--or maybe it's an away video. It shows my wife knee-deep in a mountain brook up at 9,000 feet above sea level, presenting a dry fly to a three-pound trout that doesn't yet know it's an entree. The water chuckles around her boots, and a thousand rim-lit aspens behind her pulse with autumn gold. When the city casts a shadow on my soul, I escape it through this window to a greener, fairer place--a window that I captured with my camcorder.

If you're like most Getting Starters, you too had vacations in mind (along with family events) when you considered buying a camcorder. And if you're one of us disgruntled urbanites, vacations often mean forays into that unspoiled country where a person can "regruntle."

Now if you've already hauled your video gear through the boonies and returned to screen the tale, you know that:

• As you hiked, your lightweight equipment somehow morphed into 15-pigiron sash weights, and
• Sights whose real-world beauty left you gasping produced mere yawns back home when clamped within the borders of a TV frame.

We're here today to tackle both of these problems. We'll see how to reduce equipment weight and complexity and how to maximize video's visual strengths and minimize its weaknesses. So let's take a low-tech look at back-country hardware and shooting strat…