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Home Video Hints: Common Shooting Mistakes

What's one of the differences between a professional and an amateur in any endeavor? A professional has either learned or been taught to avoid mistakes in his or her field. This can lead to a bit of arrogance on the part of the professional when viewing someone else's work. "Look at that composition." a professional camera operator might say, "This guy doesn't know head room from a head waiter." If you want to shoot video like a pro you need to know what the major mistakes are.

1) Overzealous Zooming
Let's start with an experiment. Put down your camcorder. Now, look through one of your eyeballs (or both if you are feeling ambitious) and attempt to zoom in on an object in the vicinity. Concentrate. No luck? Don't take it too hard. It's not a natural way to make an object larger on the screen. It's handy as heck, but it's not natural.

If you are new to camera work my suggestion is to only use the zoom feature when you are not rolling tape. Use it to make your subject more prominent in the screen if you can't or don't want to get physically closer (when shooting subjects like mountains in the distance, or that snarling Rottweiler next door), but don't zoom as a shooting technique. In other words, avoid recording zooms as you shoot.

2) Digital Deterioration
Have you ever zoomed your camcorder all the way in, have it pause slightly and then, as you continued to push the zoom control, watch the picture grow even more in the viewfinder? That's a digital zoom, and it's not really a zoom. Sure, the picture zoomed, but the pixels remained the same. So, don't use digital zoom. Every camera that has digital zoom, also has a menu item to turn it off. Find it and use it.

3) Reckless Recording
Few things are as frustrating as missing a great shot because you weren't recording, except, possibly, missing that shot because you thought you were recording and you were not. Learn your equipment. If it makes a clicking noise when it begins capturing footage, listen for it. If there is a blinking light in the viewfinder, look for it. If you have to look to see a tape physically moving, do so until you are sure you are rolling. If you don't, you may not only miss a great moment in video, you could end up with lots of shots of your feet.

4) Faulty Framing
The audience of your video can only see what you show them. You have a responsibility to keep the subject in the frame. When you are capturing video of people, there is a rule of thumb to make sure you have them composed correctly: keep the eyes of your subject about a third of the way down from the top of the screen. This works if you have a head-to-toe shot of the person and it works if you have an extreme close-up where the person's face fills the frame. The eyes are in the same relative pos…