Practical Shot Experiments

Practical Shot Experiments

This was our first time out practically with a camera so we went out shooting to try and experiment with types of shot and framing. We were going to change the aperture, shutter speed and ISO which we had recently learnt and wanted to get examples of their effects. This all changed when we couldn't use the camera as neither of us knew how to work it, before I got an introduction to the Canon5D with magic lantern.

First Attempt

In order to get some footage we put as much as we could find on to auto and started shooting things after a short discussion of each shot to take. We were not organised and had no set shot list so there was an amount of improvisation where it came to shooting. We instantly came across another problem, there was little to no control over the Aperture, Iso and Shutter Speed on the main menus so we decided just to shoot. Then the next problem was we didn't have good control over the focusing and zoom of out shots but through continues efforts we think we are getting better. "The inner swivel thing does the focus and the big outer swivel thing." There was one thing which made the progress of our learning particularly slower was that the camera would rarely take shots longer than 5 seconds despite there being plenty of storage on the SD memory card. I took as many shots as we thought covered all basic techniques we could do without and further control.

Here are some of the short shots we took


Camera Short Shots from Luke Heritage on Vimeo.

After our first attempt we went back and sought help and information on our various problems discovering that our lack of control could be solved with Magic lantern. The problem with the short length of video footage was due to the SD card and the cameras conversion rate. I got some instruction on the 5D and how to edit the levels of the aperture, ISO and shutter speed. Going out again the shots in the day time in the video below were our immediate experiments. We noted that when the shutter speed was faster things appeared sharper and movement was less blurred but twinned with the smaller aperture less light came through. The night shoot was a week later and I chose two shots showing the effects of focus on a wide aperture and the grain given by a higher ISO.

5D Film Clips Experiments from Luke Heritage on Vimeo.

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