Camera Workshop 1

 

Camera Workshop 1

Taking the camera out of its case!

Introduction

To start off our very first workshop, we were presented with a duffle bag holding a tripod and a carrying case containing the camera itself - the camera we used was a Black Magic 4k mini URSA - a very exciting camera to start with for me.

General starting rules + tips

The first rule we were told was the 'yours' and 'mine' rule - when handing someone a piece of equipment, particularly expensive equipment like those cameras, you say 'yours' once you feel the weight of the object shift to the other persons hands, and they say 'mine' once they are fully holding it, so that you know you can safely let go. 

When setting up a tripod, one tip to follow is unlocking all of the locks before extending all of the legs in one go, otherwise if you unlock and extend one at a time it would quickly get very awkward to set up. The other tip was to always extent the bottom legs first and not start with the top ones as the tripod's centre of gravity would make that difficult to manage.

Once the camera was safely secured onto the tripod, we had to make sure it was level using the spirit level by unscrewing it from underneath the tripod and shifting the camera around until the little bubble of air was in the circle.

Camera Settings

To start setting up a shot, the camera's exposure and white balance had to be be adjusted accordingly - the exposure being how much light reaches the camera's sensor, changed by a little blue tab by the lens. White balance is how a shot's colour is adjusted to look natural and realistic as man-made lights tend to have warmer tones whilst natural light is blueish, so settings for either have to be changed to look equally good, the setting is selected on the camera's touch screen where you pick what automatic setting fits the type of lighting you are using best.

The next step once we had our shot's settings ready was to make sure it was in focus, to do this we had to zoom in all the way onto any object and twist the wheel just behind it until the image was at its sharpest. A tip we were given for focusing a person's face was to make the eyes the main focus point as it's the most detailed part of someone's face.

Finishing up!

Finally, we learnt that the phrase 'Strike the kit!' means that it is time to pack away your equipment, usually announced once you have finished filming for the day instead of the cliched 'that's a wrap!'.