Camera Workshop

Wednesday 28th September 2016

Today we had our first camera workshop. We learned about assembling and using the camera and the boom mic and how to put people into focus and out of focus whilst they are moving or still.
Other than digital compact cameras and phones I have never used a filming camera; the camera used was the Sony Xd series.

We started off learning focus, where two people stood in front on the camera, one further back than the other. We then had to focus on one of the people's face and blur out the other and vice versa. I found this an easy task and it was easy to do on the camera.

It was when we had to focus on a person as they walked towards the camera I found most difficult, this is because as soon as they got close it would come out of focus.  This will be something I will practice on.

After this, we assembled a boom mic and connected it to the camera, one person held this, another wore headphones to hear the sound and another person was in front of the camera speaking. We decided to count to 10 first to see how it sounded compared to not using a boom mic. Then we counted to 10 but walking away from the mic to hear the sound. I also tried keeping the person in focus and shot whilst they walked away and counted to 10, again I found this easy.

Finally our final task was the white balance, we learned about the colour temperature in the Kelvin chart which is important in filming.

For example if  a candle lit scene was being filmed as a candle is around 2000k the white balance will need to be set to around this.  This is because a candle has quite a bit of red lighting and so the white balance will counteract this by adding in more blue.
 We had a person sit in front of the camera about 3.5 metres away and we adjusted the white balance to what we thought looked good and this was:

Focus: 4m
Zoom: 40
White balance: 4000 kelvins
pp2 (picture profile)

I really enjoyed the camera workshop and I look forward to learning more and gaining knowledge and experience in this area.