I recently experimented how using different focal lengths can affect shooting in a moving vehicle. I learnt focal length is an important choice when dealing with excessive camera movement. I would like test the effect focal length has on the movement of hand-held shooting. There have been times when I’ve shot hand-held and then gotten back to the edit suites and the footage looked terribly shakey on the big screen. For instance when I shot my film3 documentary on the UPF in Bendigo last year. Maybe if I was to shoot on shorter focal lengths the images would have been a lot steadier. However, due to the crowd I was often unable to get close to the subjects I was shooting so I would have had to sacrifice a tighter frame for a steady image. Amateur filmmaking often seems to be about trade-offs like this.

I plan on shooting a short hand-held scene in where the camera follows two characters as they walk and talk on a relatively long and short focal length. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this as my primary focus is my fixed-lens exercise which I will be doing on thursday along with this one. There is a chance I may not even do this handheld experiment. I don’t have time as I only have the camera booked for a limited time. However it is good to talk about either way. Obviously the handheld shot taken on the shorter focal length is going to be less shakey although it will interesting to see to what extent. I’m curious what shot I will like better.

 

The reason I am waiting until thursday to do my last experiment its the only time I can do it without being rushed. This way I could book the camera for the entire day and hopefully shoot something decent.

Over and out,

Luke