Filming Course

On Sunday the 4th of October, I went on a filming course in London to learn more about my camera (Cannon 750D) and technique. On the course I learned about white balance, focusing, Light exposure, appature, ISO and shutter speed. 

White Balance 

The left shows when the lighting is is tungsten and the white balance setting chosen is daylight. As the white balance is set to daylight when the lighting isn't daylight, the camera picks up warmer tones which makes the white appear to be yellow to the eye, our eyes have a way of correcting this so we see white however the camera doesn't therefore I learned that you have to change the setting to          correct this. 



This shot on the right shows when the white balance setting was on tungsten and the lighting was tungsten therefore the colours appear to be white as the white balance setting corrected the yellow undertones. 



The lighting in the shot on the left is daylight lighting whilst the white balance setting is tungsten therefore warm undertones appear and the shot appears to be an off white colour. 




As the lighting on the right is daylight, the white balance setting is also daylight therefore the shot appears to be a white/blue white shade to the eye. 

Focusing 

On the course, I learned about the difficulties of focusing whilst filming on a DSLR. The first thing I learned was that while filming it is important to never have the camera on manual focus as this will mean that most of the shots filmed will show the camera struggling to focus on the subject. To resolve this while filming to ensure that shots are in focus zoom in on the shot multiple times to ensure that the area that you want in focus in the sharpest it can be. 

Light Exposure

The histogram is very useful while filming to check the exposure of the shot as it prevents you from underexposing or overexposing the shot, ideal exposure is when the histogram reaches from one side to the other. Over exposure can't be fixed in post production and when filming outside it is hard to see the LCD screen therefore I will use the histogram to measure the exposure to ensure that my shots are at an ideal level of exposure. 

ISO 

The ideal ISO is from 100-400 anything above can cause noise to occur and the quality of the shot to decrease. I tested this with my camera from 100 ISO to 8400 ISO to see how the volume increases throughout. This has shown me that when filming my music video I need to make sure that my ISO is set to 100-400 as this is the safe zone and anything higher will cause some disruption to the shot. This is shown in the video below as I tested out how the noise increases as you increase the ISO.

Shutter speed

In Europe, the number of frames per second is 25 therefore the shutter speed should always stay at 1/50 unless for stylistic purposes you want to change that. I did an experiment to see what happens when you change the shutter speed. As shown in the video below the shutter speed begins at 1/50 and increases throughout to the end showing how the motion blur disappears with the increase of shutter speed and noise also appears creating shot that isn't so sharp.