The document discusses different types of cameras including DSLR, camcorder, film camera, and RED Epic cameras. It also covers key camera concepts such as lenses, focal length, exposure which is determined by shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Depth of field and sensors including CCD and CMOS chips are also overviewed at a high level.
4. Types of camera
DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex)
Excellent image quality
Changeable lens
Big sensor
Cheap(ish)
Hackable!
Not designed for filming
Lacks certain features Canon EOS 7D
Jelly effect
Poor sound recording
Can overheat
5. Types of camera
Camcorder
Can be very cheap
Increasingly powerful
Designed for filming
Simple to operate
Lens usually fixed
Can be quite limited
Panasonic HDC TM900
6. Types of camera
Film Camera
Very high resolution
Film ‘look’
Prices range from
very cheap to very
expensive Panaflex
Gold II
Very inconvenient
Becoming obsolete
7. Types of camera
RED Epic
Very high resolution (4k lines of
resolution - Full HD is 720 or
1080)
Proprietary formats
A bit expensive (over HKD
150,000)
8. Lenses
Prime - doesn’t move What difference
does the lens
Telefoto make?
Zoom - Can change focal length
Wide angle - Very short
focal length
Macro - For extreme close-up work
Fisheye
More here
9. Lenses
Focal length
The focal length of a lens determines its angle of view, and thus also
how much the subject will be magnified for a given photographic
position. Wide angle lenses have short focal lengths, while telephoto
lenses have longer corresponding focal lengths.
A common rule of thumb for estimating how fast the exposure needs to be for a
given focal length is the one over focal length rule. This states that for a 35 mm
camera, the exposure time needs to be at least as fast as one over the focal length
in seconds. In other words, when using a 200 mm focal length on a 35 mm
camera, the exposure time needs to be at least 1/200 seconds — otherwise
blurring may be hard to avoid.
10. Exposure
We can think of
EXPOSURE as
being the result of
three elements
which work
together.
Learn more
here
11. Shutter speed / frame
rate
Commonly confused, but not the same thing
Frame rate - Fps.Usually 24, 30 or 48 for video
Shutter speed - how long the frame is open for
This makes it
very simple!
12. ISO
Back in the old days of film, each roll would have an ASA or ISO
rating, which meant how fast or how sensitive to light it was.
Digital cameras work on the same principle, but this time, replace
film with the image sensor. ISO is the sensitivity level, so an ISO
of 100 is relatively slow, and an ISO of 400 and above is
considered fast.
You would use a “slow” ISO when there is a lot of light so the
image sensor is less sensitive, and a “fast” ISO when there is less
light and it is difficult to get a decent exposure without
introducing camera shake into your images.
13. Aperture
Think of aperture like the pupil in your eye.
Aperture is a measure of how much light is let
into the camera through the lens. Like your
pupil, the lens can open up (widen its aperture)
to let more light in, or close down (narrow its
aperture) to let less light in. Aperture is
measured in f/ stops and affects depth of field.
Using a wide aperture (small f/ stop) will
produce an image with a blurred background
and sharp foreground, or area of focus, and a
small aperture (large f/ stop) will produce an
image with sharpness across more of the image.
This will be explained further when we discuss
depth of field.
The lens on the left is stopped down to f/22 (letting in the least amount of light), in the middle is f/8, and on the right, f/2.8. (Credit: CBSi)
Apertures are listed in
terms of f-numbers,
which quantitatively
describe relative light-
gathering area .
Note that larger aperture openings are defined to have lower f-numbers (o4en very confusing). These two terms are o4en
mistakenly interchanged; the rest of this tutorial refers to lenses in terms of their aperture size. Lenses with larger apertures
are also described as being “faster,” because for a given ISO speed, the shutter speed can be made faster for the same
exposure. Additionally, a smaller aperture means that objects can be in focus over a wider range of distance, a concept also
termed the depth of field.