Apogee Photo Magazine: A Still Photographer's Guide to Better Video, by Peter O'Neil

Apogee Photo Magazine

A Still Photographer's Guide to Better Video

by Peter B. O'Neil
Black Rabbit Production

While many of the techniques of shooting with video are the same as in still photography, there many additional skills that will make your videos better.

Peter O'Neil

If the questions I'm asked in the field and the phone calls I get in the office are any indication, a lot of still photographers are trying out video these days. Pros find that adding video to their repertoire opens up new markets, and photo-enthusiasts sometimes want more than stills of their family vacations and other events. Many of these photographers also discover there's a little more to it than simply picking up a camcorder and pushing the record button. While there are many similarities between still photography and motion video, there are plenty of differences, too. Here are some specific techniques you can use to make your video better.

Often when I'm on a shoot, people ask about my equipment. They want to know what format I shoot. (BetaCamSP.) How much my camera cost. (Lots.) What kind of lens I have. (Canon 17:1.) Those who know a little about video will ask more technical questions about signal to noise ratios or lux ratings. But hardly anyone asks about the one thing that can make any video -- from the cheapest amateur camcorder to the latest digital BetaCam -- look better: my lowly, trusty, beat up, old tripod. It is literally the basis for solid video recording.

It may be a pain to drag around, but if you use a tripod your video will be clearer. Thirty still images are recorded each second on a videotape. Holding the camera steady with a tripod will make each one of those images sharper. The shutter speed of most camcorders is only around a 50th of a second, and that's not fast enough to freeze much camera movement. When you hand-hold, you shake, and therefore blur, each frame of video! You end up with 30 blurred pictures every second. A solid tripod will eliminate the blur and your video will be sharper.

On a more esthetic level, there's little worse than trying to watch an image that's bouncing all over the TV screen. There's sea-sickness. There's car-sickness. Astronauts even experience space-sickness. If the New England Journal of Medicine hasn't named it yet, there should be home-video-sickness, too. We've all experienced it watching our relative's vacation movies while counting the seconds till we can get off this bucking bronco of a video. You can help fight this dread affliction with a good tripod. It may not make people line up around the block to see your next show, but using a tripod will automatically make your videos more pleasant to view.

If you can't -- or just don't want to -- haul around a tripod, at least master some good hand-holding techniques:

Stand on solid footing with your legs about shoulder width apart, bend your knees slightly, tuck in your elbows, and hold the camera with both hands.

Lean against a tree or building or chair for support.

Breathe! Your muscles will start to shake if you deprive them of oxygen.

Plan camera moves so you don't end up in an awkward, unstable, and shaky position.

And that brings me to Technique Number Two.

Eliminate all pans and tilts and disable your zoom!

Just kidding. But use these camera techniques judiciously. (In fact, there is a school of thought that categorizes zooming not as a camera technique at all, but as a lens adjustment -- no different than focusing or setting an f-stop.)

Video is about moving pictures, but generally the subject should be moving, not the camera. At least you should think in those terms. Allow action to take place in front of the lens. If you need to move constantly to add action to the scene, maybe you should be using your still camera instead of your video camera.

Pans, tilts, and zooms should be motivated. There should be a reason to move. For example, if an elk walks into a meadow, of course you can pan with it. If you want to show the relationship between an elk standing in a meadow and the mountain lion that's stalking it, pan from the elk standing in the meadow to the lion. If you show your horrified mate looking to the right, pan right to see the lion eating the elk formerly standing in the meadow.

No matter what the situation, it's usually best to start a pan or tilt or zoom on one particular thing, and pan, tilt, or zoom to another particular thing. Start on one mountain peak, pan to another. Start on Mom's smiling face, tilt down to little Alice holding her spelling bee ribbon. Start on candles burning, zoom out to show a birthday party celebration.

Too often, people pan and zoom back and forth across a scene because they simply have no focus (figuratively, but sometimes literally, too.) They just don't know what they're trying to show the viewer, and this happens because they haven't taken a moment to actually look at the scene.
Balanced Rock

In Arches National Park -- one of the most beautiful places on earth -- I actually saw someone get out of his car with a camcorder to his eye as he walked up to the massive formation called Balanced Rock! Balanced Rock is an astounding sight. It's a 75-foot-tall stone pedestal capped with a 55-foot-tall, 3600-ton boulder! Now, two things strike me about that videographer. One, can you imagine experiencing the grace and awesome majesty of Balanced Rock only as a fuzzy 1 inch image in a viewfinder? And two, I sure hope I'm not asked over to his place to watch his vacation videos.

By the way, Balanced Rock is a good place for a motivated move. Start at the bottom and tilt up to emphasize its height and power. Or start at the top and zoom out to reveal a tiny person at its base to accentuate its overwhelming size.

If you take a moment to look at a scene, you can very quickly determine how you want to present it. And that's tip numero three:

Wide Shot, Medium Shot, Close Up.

In Basic Video-Making 101 the idea is to lead the viewer into a scene. Start with a wide shot to give the viewer a sense of the setting. Cut to a closer, medium shot to indicate where you're going. Cut to a close up of the element you want to show in particular. Notice I say "cut to." You could zoom to, too, -- and it could even be a motivated zoom -- but again, be careful how often you do it. The only thing worse than a shot bouncing up and down is a series of zooms one after another. I get a little home-video-sick just thinking about it.

Many still photographers get a little sick thinking about the look of video. There's just no way around it, video doesn't come close to the color depth or resolution of film; it often seems flat and washed out. Today's video technology will never match a good transparency, but there are a few things you can do to improve it.

First, understand that video likes blues and greens better than reds and yellows. Intense colors tend to "bloom" and "bleed," especially in home video formats. If you think of it as a coloring book, reds and yellows don't want to stay inside the lines -- they spread into other parts of the picture. So if you have a choice, shoot things in the blue part of the spectrum. That may sound silly, but you can control a lot of what you shoot. Ask your subjects to wear flattering blues and greens, for example, not reds.

Video also likes light. A slightly underexposed slide may be richer and deeper in color, but underexposed video is just bad. If you don't give your video enough light, you get noise -- that creepy, crawly, grainy stuff that makes solid objects seem like there's something alive just under the surface.

You can use filters with your camcorder much as you would with your still camera. Used properly, a polarizing filter can reduce glare, darken skies, and improve color saturation. It can also cause a color shift, so white balance your camera AFTER you adjust the polarizing filter. If you add a color filter like an 81A warming filter, though, white balance BEFORE you put on the filter or you'll eliminate the color effect you're trying to get.

So what is white balancing? Simply put, it tells your camera what's white. It then electronically balances red, green, and blue to a proper rendering of white. With white right, the other colors fall into place.

If you can white balance your camcorder manually, here's something you may want to try: lie to it.

If you tell your camcorder that something that's NOT white IS white, it will shift colors to compensate -- and believe it or not, that's something you may actually want to do.

For example, if you white balance on a pale blue piece of paper, the camera will try to make that blue look white. That will add a yellowish cast to the color -- a poor boy's warming filter! Just like a warming filter, though, it can also turn your blue skies green, so try this out with different pastel colors and different situations before you use it on that once in a lifetime shot.

Finally, if you want to shoot really great video, ignore everything you've read above. Well, maybe not ignore it, but at least think about it before you do it. Decide how you want to present a scene. Consider exactly what you want it to say, to show, to do, and then determine which techniques will best achieve that.

A final suggestion for a Balanced Rock shot illustrates what I mean. Maybe you want your audience to get dizzy when they look at Balanced Rock. After all, it is an enormous and overpowering formation. Well, put away your tripod, get underneath Balanced Rock and while hand holding, look up and sway a little. It'll seem like the whole thing is about to topple over -- and that's just the way you feel when you see it in person.

Remember, no matter what you're shooting, no matter what kind of equipment you have, the most important part of any video is your own brain. Take the techniques outlined here, apply them in a thoughtful manner with a clear idea of what you want to end up with, and you'll be making better videos every time you set down your still camera and pick up your camcorder.

Peter O'Neil's company Black Rabbit Productions creates and distributes video programs and other resources for photographers. He has been shooting video for broadcast, for corporate clients, and currently for Black Rabbit for more than twenty years. To learn more about some of Black Rabbit's programs, click here