Good.... the color is coming down... I looked like a lobster yesterday and of course
the most epic sentence was, "I rarely burn"..... mm-hmm...... Ahoj! This is Zdenka. Filming in low
light can be challenging sometimes. We all want that epic video, we all want
those beautiful results so in today's video I've got 5 tips, so you can nail
your technique when it comes to filming in low-light, so your result can look
like something like this.
And by the way this is also creative camera challenge.
And if you are new here, welcome. My name is Zdenka Darula. If you want to learn how
to take better photos and videos with the latest gear and possibly participate
in creative camera challenges like this one, consider subscribing. Let's start
with the gear first. When it comes to camera I've got here canon M50, not
much choice here when it comes to camera. But I'm gonna be very picky when it
comes to lens. If I would be shooting outdoors, I would not really care what
kind of lens I'm using because simply we have lots of light available. But if I'm
gonna be shooting in low-light, I'm gonna be very picky and just like in
photography, every single person when it comes to photography or video should
have at least one prime lens in their camera bag or one fast lens and those
can be very costly, except this one. 50mm lens F/1.8. I'll use it with
Viltrox speed booster. The F/1.8 aperture will allow me to use lower ISO
so I'm not going to have as much grain in my footage. This 15-45 mm
kit lens is f/3.5-6.5 which means that I have to use high ISO.
The only thing I gotta watch for is the aperture value. If I'm gonna be filming
with F/1.8 f-stop that means that only little tiny portion of the image will be
sharp and everything else will be blurry, so the background and the foreground
will be blurry. That means also that if I'm gonna be tracking an object, I might
lose it very easily. So in this case, I might want to increase the aperture a
little bit to perhaps F/2.8 or even a little bit higher.
If I'm going to film with zoom lens, if I have it on 70 mm, it is good.
Aperture is F/2.8 so I'm letting lots of light in. However the more I zoom the
less light I'm going to let in. Aperture is gonna go up, ISO is gonna go up,
footage will not look the best. But if you don't have these lenses, you can
still do a lot of things to get your video look beautiful. Which actually you still
want to do even if you have those prime lenses because anything extra will help
to get you amazing result.
If you find that it's simply just too dark, try to move your subject a little
bit closer to any available light source. So if you are filming outdoors, look for
street lamps or neon signs or window shops where there's a lot of light
coming through. If you're filming indoors, try windows or maybe lamps sitting on a
table. You should also have in your camera bag video light and there are
many on the market. Cheap to expensive, you can directly mount them on your camera
or you can place them around your subject. And I listed few lights I use in
a video description below the video. Other options like reflector panels and
mirrors can help as well to keep the ISO as low as possible. There are situations
when you might not have access to any available light source and in that case
you might actually turn everything to your advantage. You might use the
darkness to your advantage to create mystery or silhouette atmosphere. What it
means is that you might have interesting background so you can have that to show
in your video and have the object a bit darker, it does bring out mystery. It
doesn't have to be all the time about the expression or the face. When it comes
to filming in low-light, you might not want to film in high frame rates because
that will bring the ISO higher, so filming in 60fps is not
the best choice but it's still better than filming in 120fps.
The best option would be to film in 30fps or even
better in 24fps.
Next thing you want to do is to control a shutter speed. You might not want to go
with a fast shutter speed because that will block the light coming into the
camera. A good rule of thumb is to double your
shutter speed so if you are filming in 24fps you might want to
use 1/48th of a second. If you are filming in 30fps, you want to use
1/60th of a second. Basically doubling the shutter speed will give you
the most natural motion blur..... and try to do some serious work she always does this...
There's one more trick you might want to try. If you are filming not a movement,
not a person, if you are filming perhaps interior and you need just lot more
light in. You can slow down the shutter speed. So if you're filming in 30fps,
you might slow it down to 1/30th, if you are filming 24fps,
you might slow it down to 1/24th, but you have to obviously
pan if you are panning, very very slowly. Or if you are just doing a static
shot, that might bring a lot more light in. But if you are gonna be filming a
person moving, then definitely I would do a double shutter speed.
So once you apply all those tips and tricks, then your video can look quite
nice.
OK. Camera challenge time. Your turn. Film a B roll video sequence in low
light with person, no person, with object, no object, anything goes. With lights, no
lights, any kind of a story and keep it under one minute. If you are going to be
using music, please use only music from Epidemic Sound or Artlist or YouTube
royalty-free library. Please don't use any other music because I simply cannot
verify if it is copyrighted. Also, when you are submitting the video, make sure you
add a title of the music and the source you got it from. You can upload the
videos to ZD Camera Challenge Facebook group or Instagram account and use
#zdchallenge15. The deadline is June 30th 2020 and the most interesting
ones will be featured and reviewed in another video sometimes in July. Hit the
thumbs up if you liked today's video and subscribe to more. Questions, comments,
wanna say hi? Leave it in a comment section below and I'll see you my
friends in the next video....Cau... Ahoj...