Exposure & Focusing Settings
Lesson 4 from: Intermediate Drone Videography and PhotographyDirk Dallas
Exposure & Focusing Settings
Lesson 4 from: Intermediate Drone Videography and PhotographyDirk Dallas
Lessons
Lesson Info
Exposure & Focusing Settings
So we just went over the settings, and what I'm gonna do now is actually put them into practice in a scenario that would be like a real world scenario. So I have my friend out in the flower field, and what I'm gonna do is take the drone up, see what it looks like, adjust things as necessary, and then do a couple camera moves on her. And just as a reminder, this cord right here is not something that you need. This is what I have so that you guys can actually see my screen, it's recording it. So don't worry about this cord right here. Okay, so now I'm gonna check my settings and make sure I'm dialed in before I do any camera moves. So my ISO is at 100, that looks good. My shutter though, I do need to kick that down. And I wanna put that at 50th. But now you can see I'm a little blown out, I've lost all the detail in the sky. So I need to kick my aperture down. If you don't have the Phantom drone, and you have a Mavic, you won't have the access to the aperture. So what you'll need to do i...
s, you'll need to either throw on an ND filter that is rated a little higher, or you could try playing with your ISO. But what you really want to focus on is getting that shutter to a 50th of a second. This looks pretty good, I'm confirming it on my histogram. I might kick the aperture to nine just to make sure. I can always bring up the shadows just a little bit. I like to make sure that the detail's in the highlights 'cause it's harder to pull those details out if I blow them out once I'm in post. Alright, so next I'm gonna line up my shot and what I think might be cool to do is an orbit shot as my friend is walking through the flower field. So what I'll do is, I'm gonna tap on her. Let the focus get set. Then I'm gonna hit MF, and now that is in manual focus mode. I won't actually move my focus there, it's just a thing for me though to know that focus is set. It's not gonna shift and change. So once I do that, I'm ready to start my move. And those center points are helping me keep her nice and centered. So that's why I like to have them up on my screen. And now you see we have a background element like those vans so I would cut the shot before you ever see those vans enter the frame. Now we might try something different, maybe a tracking shot. I'm gonna get a little lower for this one. Tilt my gimbal up a little bit. And just kind of track with her. Get a little lower, get some of those foreground flowers in the shot. I'll try getting her on the right third, just so that it's framed a little bit better, and then I'll try to match my speed to her speed. I could add a little bit of yaw and try to come in front of her. Now what I might try to do is do another move where I cross the action. I'll pass over her. So I'm gonna get low for this shot so I have some nice foreground elements. I'll just keep this nice and straight. Just fly right by her. And that's a simple pushing to her, but it looks really cool especially when I'm low because those flowers are just passing by and it almost looks like my camera is gonna hit them. It's a really cool shot, one that would be hard to do if you didn't have a drone because you'd be stepping all over those flowers. I'm gonna just kind of swing in front of her. So for that camera move, what I just did was I was behind her, I came around her, I was doing the orbit and I ended up right in front of her. And it looked really cool with all those rows of flowers. What I want to do though is try that shot a little lower to get a little bit more of a foreground element. And I'll try doing that same thing but in the opposite direction. So this is a cool tracking shot. I wanna make sure I line her up on that rule of third. But what I'm gonna do is now introduce some yaw. Awesome. For this move I'm just doing a top down shot where I'm right over my friend and I'm looking straight down on her. And then I'm trying to track her as she's moving so that means I'm having to match her speed which can be a little difficult. But if I have the center point and my grid lines with that diagonal line it can really help me find her and just keep it locked in on her, matching the speed as she's walking. And it's just a really unique shot to get so I thought that was pretty cool to maybe mix-in with these other shots I was doing. I'm gonna adjust my aperture a little bit to let in a little more light. And I'm gonna make sure my focus is set since I've moved a little bit. Then I'm gonna lock it. I'll try to swing in front of her. Alright so, that was just to show you a little bit about what it'd be like in the real world if I was presented with this situation, how might I approach it. Again, I'm always thinking about my settings. I wanna dial them in to the things I just talked to you guys about in the previous section. And then once I have them I wanna try to lock them. If I change distance from my subject, I need to think about my focus again and locking it again. If the clouds move and the sky gets a little bit more opened up with light, the scene becomes brighter. I need to adjust a setting to make sure I'm still hitting the 1/50th of a second but I'm properly exposed. These are all things you need to be mindful of. Let's jump into the next section.
Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
There was some good and helpful information here! However he stated that when shooting video he sets the camera focus on a stationary subject and then put it in manual mode so as to avoid the camera re-focusing on a different plane, but I would have liked to have heard his tips for camera focusing on his shots where the subject was moving toward or away from the camera.