I have always been a fan of using less expensive, but decent quality gear to make good pictures and footage. A knowledge of the limitations of the gear and a good sense of composition and brevity go a long way to communicating well. It's really satisfying to make a great image with a modest tool, and it beats taking out a big loan for a fancy camera.
I have a lot of video cameras at hand, and it's not the best camera that get's the most use in my personal life. It's my four year old Canon Elph. I can move around with it like my body is a human camera crane. It's fun. You can put it at all kinds of wild angles and push it thru fences and trees to get cool points of view. You can hold it way up it on a monopod and shoot from 12 feet in the air.
At the top of the heap of what I could use is the Sony Z7U hdv camera. Then there's the Sony FX-1. It's an older hdv camera that is also pretty great. Then there's the trusty old Panasonic DVX-100 , which was the first prosumer dv camera that had 24 frames per second capability. Or I could use one of my pawnshop CrapCams.
The thing is, I really like shoting with the old Elph. It shoots 640x480 video at 30 fps. It has a microphone. It's small and I can take it anywhere and it happens to take good stills too. I take all of the kid movies, childbirth, pets, whatever. The first time I saw the video from it on a big hdtv, I was blown away. Maybe it's a little soft and the color could be more saturated but I don't really care. It works and it doesn't suck. Just remember to wipe off the lens once in a while.
My wife Simone does PR for the University of Memphis and needs me to shoot video interviews from time to time and sometimes I'm glad to do it. But I figured that she should be able to do it herself with an Elph (or something similar) and a simple technique. I found her a Canon G8 or 9 on ebay with four batteries for about $350. This is a sweet brick of a still camera with video too. It shoots HD also (of a sort). I told her to find a nice setting to shoot where there is some light on the subject's face and some depth behind them. Then keep close, we're talking camera mic here. Don't zoom in. Keep it wide and move in close. I repeat: this is critical for good sound with an on-camera mic. It will also improve your stability-especially if you dont have a tripod.
Simone did her shoot. She took the footage into iMovie, edited it and added some text. Then she spit out an mpeg4 for the web and uploaded it to the University's youtube and facebook sites. It looks great and sounds fine. And most importantly, I didn't have to do it myself! Here's one of her projects.
Nothing fancy but it's fine, no?
This spring, I find myself helping out with instructing a journalism class that will be using Minio Flip cams to do reporting. They can make remarkable pictures if handled well. The challenge will be to work around the limitations of those little cameras and especially the microphone, . The object is to help teach the class how to get the video thru the shooting, editing, compression and posting process and hopefully come out with a well-illuminated and audible story with a beginning , middle and an end. I think it will be fun. That's why I got into this business in the first place, right?
