How to avoid common lighting exposure problems

Watch Out for Lighting Extremes

Pay attention to the overall differences in lighting in the view finder. Remember your auto exposure, for most cameras, looks at the average brightness of the whole field of view to determine how much light it captures. If there are lots of white or bright lights, then your subject's face may be under exposed. In David Pogue's excellent book iMovie 2: The Missing Manual, David reminds us that a DV camcorder can capture contrast ratios of only about 4 to 1 (compared to 10 to 1 for film based cameras). This means that that bright spot on your subjects forehead might translate to pure white in the captured video or that dark grey objects will appear totally black. Either by adjusting lighting or re-positioning your subjects and/or camera, insures that the lighting does not show extremes of light or dark.

This video will show and demonstrate how to avoid common lighting exposure problems.