Setting up Your Camera for Videography

In the recent past, Smart Photography introduced to you the basics of videography with ILCs (interchangeable lens cameras, which include D-SLRs and mirrorless) with two articles. Now, it is time to put that theory to practice. As you would set up your camera for a particular genre of photography (street, wildlife etc), you need to do the same for videography too. Let’s start with a simple case, like a small function (a birthday party) at your home. This article will explain how to set the various parameters on your camera, for such an event.

Before we go further, here is one point that you should be aware of. The electricity that you tap from your home wall socket to power all your appliances (TV, computer, refrigerator, washing machine, etc.) is not steady but comes like a wave. That is, it oscillates (Picture 1). This causes light from most sources to flicker though we feel that it is steady because of a phenomenon called ‘flicker fusion’. The oscillations called ‘cycles’ are measured in ‘Hertz (abbreviated as Hz)’ which is cycles per second. This is also called the frequency and, in our country, it is 50 Hz. I am sure you have seen this description many times as it is specified for all appliances. There are also some countries (mainly the USA) where the power supply is at 60 Hz. We will come back to this a little later.

So how do we start? Follow the steps given hereunder sequentially.

Switch to video mode

Most ILCs operate in two different modes viz., still and video. You