Shutter Question for Director's of Photography

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bentramer81

Well-known member
I shot an entry for a 10 hour film festival last Sat. and I have some blown out shots. So I have a quick question. It was very sunny.

1. When shooting in manual mode, and adjusting the shutter ring manually how do I know what is a safe rule of thumb so the picture is not to dark and not to bright (basically just right). Is there some sort of meter on the camera that I should be sure it stays within in a certain parameter? If not is there any other tips D.P.'s use to set the shutter ring? :costumed-smiley-047
 
You mean your iris?

If you do, then you would use zebras and/or a scope to judge the frame for proper exposure. Few cameras have a Waveform Monitor built-in, but more of this year's models do have it as a feature.

More common is the zebra function on a video camera. Adjusting your iris open or closed with zebra turned on will introduce more stripes or less respectively. Depending on what level you have the zebra sensitivity set to, the stripes should either appear over white and bright areas of the frame or be irised down to the point where they just begin to disappear.

You can search zebra or exposure here or on the web for a better explanation.

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You can adjust your shutter speed, but it will affect the flow of your image. IE too slow of a shutter speed creates too much motion blur, and too much will be Gladiator-esque choppy. As a rule of thumb, I use 1/60 shutter speed for basic shots shooting in 30F/60i, and 1/48 in 24F. For action shots, I'll crank it up to 1/120 or 1/200 (makes it choppier).

For sunny days, use your Netural Density filters and adjust your aperture/iris. There is an exposure meter in the top right display. Frame the area you want to expose in the middle of your frame (zoom in if you need to). Generally, you shouldn't use WHITE to measure exposure, as you will end up stopping down too much. On the flip side, you don't want to blow out your whites, as you can't recover that information once it's gone.

Green grass is a good way to measure exposure on the run. Set your exposure so the camera is happy, then adjust it to meet your needs in terms of properly exposing your subject. I tend to shoot a tad underexposed (1/3 to 2/3 a stop) as to not lose any necessary whites.
 
Set your Zebra setting to 85 % and check it during recording, bring up iris until sky is in zebra. Try TV mode and push button for fast autoiris to see the exposure meter in the middle setting. Push again and you are in manual.

Use extra ND filter screw on.
 
xray said:
Set your Zebra setting to 85 % and check it during recording, bring up iris until sky is in zebra. Try TV mode and push button for fast autoiris to see the exposure meter in the middle setting. Push again and you are in manual.

Use extra ND filter screw on.
Click to expand...

Is the Zebra setting in the custom preset? Or is this adjusted somewhere else?
 
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