video2zero

Clean the lens

Web video is often shot handheld with small cameras, no supplementary lighting or sound. This has unfortunate implications for folks who are sloppy about keeping their lenses clean.

1. Shooting handheld with a small cam and most of your shots have to be wide open to minimize camera movement.

2. The small CCDs inside small cameras don’t perform well in low light. The move from DV to HDV crams more pixels on to the same size chip so low light performance suffers a setback. Result: outdoors is the preferred place to shoot web video.

3. Run and gun style shooting encourages the use of permanently-attached protective lens filters.

Shooting outside, wide open, run and gun, with a lens filter – these conditions describe a lab-perfect environment for outing dirty lenses. Any speck on the lens surface will show up on screen.

I see a lot of web video shot with dirty lenses, and have shot plenty myself. Often we get away with it because the sun is not in the frame, and the smudge is confined to an unimportant edge of the screen. But shooting run and gun you never know what might creep into the edge of the frame, or when the subject might move between you and the sun.

Not a real profound insight perhaps. Clean your lens makes it to the number one spot not because its the most important but because it’s the easiest to apply.

My recommendations:

Carry some microfiber cloth. Ken Rockwell goes into more details on lens cleaning.

Don’t use a filter unless you have to. Filters can cause problems, however clean they are, whenever a light source appears in the frame. But give those refractions a couple of fingerprints to bounce around with, and whatever you thought you were shooting, you end up with a light show.

[BONUS LINK] Andy Dickinson’s 3 S’s to improve web video.