2008-05-22

Using a gray card


Using a gray card with the HF100 from Martin Koch on Vimeo.

A gray card is a great way to adjust a "technically" correct exposure in controlled lighting conditions that don't change during shooting. It can also be useful to set the exposure in difficult scenes like e.g. an object in front of a bright background. You'll find gray cards at any serious photo store.

Put the gray card under the same light as your main object. Point the camera at the card, step close or zoom in on it and adjust the exposure in manual mode.

On the HF100 there's no manual mode. You can either lock a certain arperture (Av mode) or shutter speed (Tv mode). In the video above I show you how to display the exposure settings, how to lock the shutter speed to 1/50s and then how to also lock the arperture (and gain) setting chosen by the HF100.

2 comments:

chrisyking said...

Hi. I just bought an HF100 and wondered why my 50i footage was all jittery in bright light. I worked out that the camera was changing my shutter speed to 1/100!!
Is there any way of stopping the camera doing this other than TV mode? It basically means you can't use any other mode in bright light!!

Is this a software fault on my camera? I'm very annoyed as it has pretty much destroyed my honeymoon footage!! Is there a workaround for this in final cut or whatever? Maybe you could do a post on this?

Cheers

Chris

Martin Koch said...

Hi Chris,

I'm sorry to hear your honeymoon footage is not optimal.

What you need (next time) is an extra ND filter (the built in one seemed to be too weak in your case). They come in different strenghts and work like sunglasses. They block light without changing the colors and the camera has to choose a lower shutter speed in Av mode.

Maybe you can do something with frame blending and motion blur filtering in FCP. Good luck.