Learning to Use the Camera

Today, we learned how to use the camera in the film studio.  The cameras we were learning to use were the Sony NX5: 

We worked in groups of four.  In my group was Georgia, Alice and Simon.  The first thing we were instructed to do was to open the tripod, which was fairly straight forward. We learned how to change the height of the tripod by loosening or tightening the “legs”.

Next, we got the camera out of the padded case and attached it to the tripod, which was also quite easy.  To do it, you just needed to slide the camera on the base of the tripod while holding down the top button and wait to hear the click. 

After the camera was securely on the tripod, we put the battery into the battery compartment and were instructed how to open and close the lens.  I found the lens shutter switch to be very entertaining!

Now was the time when we actually turned on the camera.  The small red “ON” button was difficult to find, which was a good innovation, so that one doesn’t accidentally press it while filming. 

To make sure that the camera would shoot on-level, we had to “bubble” it.  The small green disk on the tripod, which had a small bubble in it was the tool to do this with.  When the bubble was in the middle of the small circle, it would be centered. We took a lot of time to do this; it was tedious but of course essential for filming.

We learned how to white-balance, which means that we matched the light perceived on the camera to the actual light, so it wouldn’t turn out a different/dull colour.  To do this, we used Simon’s shirt (which was white) and pressed the small white-balance button on the left hand side of the camera.  There was also a large sheet-like disk used for white balancing, which would be useful when filming, so that the film crew doesn’t have to hunt down something white to balance to! We experimented balancing indoors and outdoors, looking at how different lights could be used. 

Examples of White Balancing

There were a lot of intimidating buttons on the camera, but by the end of the lesson, we were familiar with almost all of them.  The dials near the lens of the camera were important to know how to use.  There were three dials: zoom, focus and exposure.  The zoom one was evidently for zooming in and out. The focus was to focus the camera, so it wouldn’t be blurry. To do this, we needed to zoom into whatever we were about  to film, focus on it, and then zoom back out to the range we would be shooting at.  It made for a very clear picture. The exposure dial was to change how bright the scene was, but we didn’t really use it since we had our light sorted out with the white-balance. 

An interesting thing that we experimented with, with the cameras was the use of shutter speed.  By changing the shutter speed on the display screen, the quality and realistic look of the film was dramatically altered.  Increasing shutter speed made for a surreal effect, everything being very defined and quick. Matt waved his hand in front of the camera fairly quickly at shutter speed 215, which made it look like his hand just had a ridiculous amount of fingers.  Decreasing the shutter speed made the film look very low quality, everything in slow motion.  The optimal shutter speed is 25 frames per second.

An Interesting Example of Shutter Speed

I found it really fun and interesting to be learning how to use the cameras! It was fascinating to see all the things the cameras could do, all the different ways they could be experimented with.  It was  a nice change from staying in the classroom as well!