by Greg Halliday

Created on: September 26, 2007

In the excitement of capturing and viewing moving images, often the basic rules of image capture of any form are forgotten or over looked. To capture top quality, easy to watch and pleasurable on the eye motion pictures with your camcorder, you must know, understand and apply the not too complicated rules of all visual art. These rules are used by painters, movie makers and still photographers alike to ensure they achieve a balanced image and the visual focus is directed to the part of the image that is the core of the image as a whole.

Framing
Apart from the obvious error of loping off heads, or having the second person in a conversation outside the frame, there is the rule of thirds. You will frequently hear of this rule in the still photography magazines and books and it applies equally to videography. The rule of thirds indicates that the point of interest in an image should be in the left, right, top or bottom third of the image. It may sound odd, but it actually works and many modern digital cameras will have a view finder display option that divides the screen in this way to assist in achieving this framing.

Try this little exercise to learn from the professionals, measure the width of your TV screen, divide that by three then measure that distance in from the left side and place some black electrical tape on the TV frame to mark this position top and bottom. Do the same measuring in from the right hand side, then repeat the whole process for the height of the screen. When you sit back in your lounge now, you should be able to visualise lines drawn between these points so that there is a grid across the screen. Now while your watching telly, every not and then check where the key point of the image lines up. For example, when you're watching the news you'll be surprised to note that the announcer's eyes will be at the level of the top two pieces of tape on the side. In travel shows the presenter will be in the left or right third with the scenery in the other two thirds. Learn the framing the professionals use and learn to visualise this through the viewfinder of your camcorder to achieve visually pleasing framing.

Exposure
I'm not going to go into the technicalities of exposure control settings of advanced video camera here, what I am alluding to here is being aware of light, it's direction, intensity and the range of light to dark (or contrast) of the image in your frame. There are some lighting conditions that can never be compensated for by a video cameras

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