Introducing the camera during the first week of lesson was a great start since it being a new semester for me, I had something familiar to work with. I have experienced working with cameras but mostly DSLR and a few times with the big camera similar to Sony-EX3. I had proper training for the DSLR camera in school and then started using the big camera when I was on internship. I was just told briefly on how to use the big camera and went out to shoot immediately. The settings for DSLR and the big cameras are similar but getting familiar to where the settings were was difficult.
So far the lessons have taught me the right way of using the camera and where all the settings are and what are their functions. In week 2 lesson there was this part about white balance and how it can be troublesome. I usually prefer to do it manually since the exposure that turns out in the camera is similar to what you see with your eye. Since there are presets and you can tweak it I think that it will be the fastest way to shoot if you are in a hurry and during post production you can do the touch up. I am glad that we have the opportunities to shoot and review what we have done. This is good so that we know if what we have done is right or wrong and how we go about improving it.
For example, in week 1 the assignment given to, we were to reshoot the 50 seconds video. Previously, during lesson when we shoot my team was shooting a landscape of both the escalators going up and down towards the library. It was a nice shot however, it was not aligned such that the building looked like it was not straight. When I was redoing the shoot I kept that in mind and make sure that the buildings look straight. I make sure that the tripod and camera was set correctly so that such mistakes would not happen again.
My first 50 seconds video was symmetric. I am in love with this kind of shot. This is because I love how both sides are balanced, similar and how it can turn out to be so perfect. I got inspired to shoot that particular streets because it’s the road that I usually go to school so I thought it would be visually nice to shoot it here and at this perspective that gives a symmetric look. The settings for the exposure was good but it could have been better if I increase the f-stop so that the sky will look more define.
My next 50 seconds video was busier in terms of the foreground and background. There were more actions thus making the shot look livelier. I shot at this particular angle so that it captures the overlapping action of cars and trams going towards different direction, pedestrian crossing on the background and foreground. I wanted to get a similar feel to Lumiere brother’s first films, capturing the actions at the right timing. I tried to shoot at the timing when the tram starts to move and when the traffic for the tram is about to turn red. I choose that timing so that once the traffic for the tram turns red the rest of the traffic will be green thus there were more actions going on horizontally.
