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A very basic and important feature of all camcorders is exposure. No matter how basic your camcorder is, it will have an exposure facility, so it pays to know how to use it.
Defining exposure:
How much exposure is enough? Your video quality depends on the amount of light that is reflected on your camcorder’s image sensor. If there’s too much light, there’s the fear of the bright parts of your video looking faded or white and without any details. If there’s insufficient light in your camcorder, you’ll be faced with dark patches.
Exposure control: With this feature, you can adjust the amount of light that enters the camcorder and adjust it so that your video is either lighter or darker.
How to use this feature: Usually, camcorders have a numbered scale to adjust exposure. These numbers are incremented from -2 to 2 with a default setting at 0. If you want more light, you move from 0 onwards on the + side, and conversely, if you want it lighter, move to – from 0. The thumb rule of exposure is that it’s better to have very dark videos or underexposed ones rather than a very light one or overexposed one.
Handycam Exposure
When to use exposure control: If you’re shooting a scene with a measure of difficult lighting, that’s when exposure control comes in handy. Let’s say you’re in a pitch dark room and cannot get all the details of the room on your camcorder. You can bring some light into your video by using the exposure control feature. Alternatively, if you want to do a very bright picture, lessen the exposure reading and take the shot.
But how does exposure control work? This feature takes in the whole scene and alters its brightness. In certain cases, it works fine, but in some others it may lead to problems. If there is a scene with bright light and darkness at the same time, exposure control cannot help. But if you bring in more light into the scene, the already bright portions will be much brighter now and cause a blow out.
Adjusting exposure on a camcorder: As you know, exposure refers to the quantum of light that’s let into the camcorder, or that amount of light which the CMOS and CCD image sensors and devices are generally exposed to. Here, the image enters the camcorder and gets recorded. Overexposure creates poor recordings, so here’s how to use your camcorder to get the best effect:
* Turn on the camcorder. Ensure that it is in Recording Mode or Camera.
* Next, go to the camcorder’s menu and check out all the icons related to exposure settings.
* Now, go to the settings screen and adjust the speed of the shutter. Set this to the number of fractions you desire. If you have large fractions with small denominations, it will help you expose the imaging sensors to get greater light, while small fractions expose the CMOS and CCD sensors to bring in less light.
* Go to exposure setting on the menu and make out the diameter of the exposure you want.
By Mithi Chinoy
