Author: Rob Taylor

Overview At first blush, cameras can seem overwhelming. There are so many abbreviations and random little letters flashing all over the viewfinder, so many buttons, so many menus filled with words that almost seem to make sense, but never quite do. This lesson is meant to hone in on three key camera settings that affect the lighting of a camera. Learning how to manipulate these three settings is the heart of good camerawork. They take a lesson to learn and a lifetime to master—again, assuming Siri doesn’t become sentient and figure this out for us. Explainer When you use...

Overview The exposure triangle is worth lingering on—it’s the mechanical heart of any filmmaking or photography process, and worth breaking into multiple classes. Students who figure it out will take exponentially better shots than ones who struggle to. Once students are starting to get the hang of getting the correct exposure, you can add in the additional variable of area of focus, and its relationship to the camera settings. Check out these two shots. The one on the left, with the shallower depth of field, simply looks “more artistic,” mostly because it’s something that most phones can’t yet do...

Overview If a student can understand the basic principles of getting exposure correct through photography, then video should be a pretty easy to make transition. That said, there are some fundamental mechanics of video that require a little bit of extra understanding in order to give a student the full ability to use his or her camera as a tool. Frame rate rarely comes up, but it’s a valuable thing to understand in the raw mechanics of a video, and gives a filmmaker one more “knob” they can turn to get the perfect shot. Explainer We don’t tend to...