Camera Workshop

 

This image is from our first camera workshop which took place in October. On this day, we were taught the basic of a camera which was really interesting as I've never worked with this type of camera before. The main part of the workshop was to build our knowledge of balancing the camera on a tripod. Building our knowledge of how to balance a camera properly is really important as the last thing you want to happen whilst filming is the the camera to start moving.

On the tripod that me and my Callum were using had two friction points which could be used to keep the camera steady. One was located on the left side of the tripod which is visible in the photo, and the other was just below this. The friction point on the left is used to stop the camera leaning forwards of backwards. The reason for the camera doing this is because it wouldn't be centred in the middle of the tripod. The trick we were taught was to hold the handle on the top of the camera and try and balance it on our fingers so it doesn't tip either way. Everything has a centre of gravity meaning that it can balance evenly and doing this with your fingers meant that you can find the point in the camera that will balance best on the tripod, from here you then attach the plate from the tripod onto the bottom of the camera and re-attach it until it locks in place. We then also had to bear this in mind when attaching the battery as this will affect the weight distribution.

The second friction point on the camera allows you to control the movement of the camera. If you increased the amount of friction at this point then it would become more difficult to move the camera side to side or pan whereas if you took the friction away from this point the camera would be able to move from side to side a lot easier and panning more smooth. With this knowledge it will really help me with filming in the future because if these issues every come up whilst filming I'd have the ability to know how to fix this quickly and efficiently.

Setting up the tripod was the easiest part of the workshop as this is something I've had experience with before. We adjusts the height of the tripod to suit our needs and this meant that when it came to using the tripod it was comfortable and helped us work better when doing a bit of filming. We had to keep an eye on the spirit-level and make sure that it was sat within the circle, the spirit-level was very helpful in making sure that all the legs where even and the camera wouldn't be tilting in a certain direction.

Once everything was set up we then moved on to learning about the white balance of the camera. We used a blank bit of white paper and held this up to the camera to adjust the true-colour. Before we did this this there wasn't enough saturation and everything was very dull which isn't something you would notice at first, but after white balancing the camera it made a significant impact. This will help massively in the future as it mean that our image will have the correct colour tones and create a more natural look and we won't have to mess around in post-production trying to fix mistakes.