Filming in shadowy areas

[Cynthia Stepien]

I have a Canon XH A1 and have to shoot a 5-9 pm beach club that is under trees and thus people are heavily in the shadow.
How do you film the people if the majority have shade on them? You recommend a light or using a lower f stope? Or should I use a light as much as possible?


Secondly, I filmed in a club using first automatic sound but it was blown out. Then I tried the manual settings and it came out worse.

I know I should plug into the sound board but the sound engineer is being problematic. Any recommendations how to reduce audio distortion when recording onto the camera using the camera settings?


Thank you very much

 

[Jordan Scott Price]

Any questions you have about sound should be posted in the Sound forum. You will get a lot more feedback there.

As for photography: It depends on a lot of things. Have you scouted this location already and shot test footage at the shooting hours? 5-9pm represents a huge swing in ambient light level, but that also varies drastically where you are in the world. There's not much we can help you with because you haven't provided a lot of information and you've asked a very difficult and broad question. It's hard to prescribe anything specific because the light level at 5pm will be drastically different from that of 9pm. This is why scouting and testing are so important. If you can, go to the location at the hours you plan to shoot. You will know a lot more after that.

If you find you are starved for light, look into renting/buying an on-camera LED to sit on the XHA1's coldshoe. If you find you are pretty close to an acceptable exposure without lights, you can turn shutter OFF/set it to 360 degrees/set it to 1/30 of a second (whichever setting applies to the XHA1). This will increase your light a stop.

 

[Cynthia Stepien]

I am in Greece by the way, but my main concern is the extreme shadow brought by the trees which creates shadow on all the people. I have a small light on top of my camera but it isn't long lasting. I'm shooting in 24f, so you think a 1/24 shutter speed will be acceptable and bring in some decent light for 7 pm shots, let's say?