regarding the camera, lens aside, start with setting the white balance, then shoot on manual and tweak the aperture setting… most dslr’s have white balance mode you can put a neutral grey cloth or card up, take a pic and set the new balance, or some sub division of the process.
(once you get past the low end guff cam’s the auto WB is usually ample for ‘general’ shooting, but, lights aside, things like skin tones can need a little tweak, sun tan’s in a bottle can be a monster for orange people lol.)
the apature setting depends on the lens used, the coatings, the number of lenses etc, the internal ‘cenrter bit’ these days is a composite plastic multi layered all in one type, gives better depth of view for one attribute. But…the parallex affect can be brought out or faised in a bit with an aperture change, in photo’s you the chromatic fringing (purple greens blues etc) that apears on the edges of things, i think with lights, especially led’s, this gives those weird colour effects in the white balence area if you know what i mean.
Beyond that filters help in some situasions, but ehh, less your inclined into the realms og photagraghy/filming it starts adding up very quickly to be buying filters etc.
couple other pointers are the expose modes, i.e. center spot,centre weighted average and average, the center only will have the most dramatic effect as the cameras dynamic range just aint gunna cut it on 5 million thousand luminums in the middle, 5 on the outer lol. centre weighted produces a little ‘sexy appeal’ with the outer fading out (blacking out) a little more gradule, and average metering doing th whole job, well, as far as it can with such a vast difference in light and darks… e.g. blowing out the centre beam but getting the rest in luvly verses blacked out outers and a wonderful bit in the middle with all the chromatic abberences being maximised in the middle…(the harder you push the limits the more each little thing increases, and the amount of little things also increase.).
which leads to upping iso’s, increasing the apature f/ stop (making thw hole smaller) and of course upping the wide dinamic range, all of which needs to be adjusted to suit… change the shutter speed and theres a slight difference of effect regaurding the apature, change the iso range to suit… which funily enough does not follow the common ‘rule of thumb’ of low iso for strong light hi iso for low light, there’s some truth there but but…ehhh you really really need to get the triangle thing in balence (iso, appature, shutter speed), which always means an iso change. Try it and see, you’ll find there’s a ratio of good to bad shots, e.g. take ten foto’s at the ‘punter settings’ and you’ll get 7 reasonable pics, verses the extreme or professional shots doings a 4 or 5 excellent shots out of ten because they got the iso right…
and i waffle on there lol…
extended dynamic range, iso and aperture…and of course set your white balance with a grey card…or any neutral colour.
and of course up the ambient lighting a touch to reduce the dynamic range the camera has to cope with, it’ll look the same on the footage only better.(close the aperture, or lower the iso or speed up the shutter and it darkens down again…)
all good fun.
