WALK THE SET

Half of the operator’s job is to make sure the right things are composed properly in the frame at the right time. The other half of the operator’s job is to keep everything else out. With experience this becomes easier and easier: I can walk into a room and immediately notice the glass-covered pictures on the wall that are miniature mirrors that I have to keep myself out of; the shiny surfaces in which the boom and boom operator will be reflected; and several vertical objects such as floor lamp stands that will make certain angles detrimental for closeups unless the actor is supposed to have a light growing out of them.
Other things are sneakier, and it’s always a good idea to walk the set and look for things that you may not immediately pick up by looking through the camera, such as cables and C-stand legs. It can also be helpful to look at the set with your eyes, free of the viewfinder, and see what you may have missed detecting. I remember shooting a shot that started on a glass table, and the reflection in the table surface was so strong that I didn’t notice the furniture pad laying underneath it until someone else, using only their eyes, pointed it out to me.
There was an old TV series called “Beauty and the Beast” whose art department always tried to hide a small red toy lobster on the set.

ADJUST THE CAMERA, NOT THE ACTOR

Sometimes actors miss their marks consistently, and it’s almost always easier to move the camera to restore the composition than it is to try to move the actor’s mark. Let them miss their mark consistently rather than giving them a new mark to miss. At least they’ll end up in the same place every time, and you have more control over the camera that you do over them.
If you do need to move an actor in order to get a better shot, and there’s more than one actor in the shot, don’t move the star if you can help it. I learned that lesson the hard way once. Move the lesser actor.

COMPOSITIONS DON’T HAVE TO BE BALANCED

In a 1980’s movie entitled “The Hit,” two characters have a conversation at the base of a lighthouse. The camera is on the ground looking up and the bulk of the lighthouse dominates the dead center of the frame. One character is leaning against a car in the foreground on frame left, and the right side of the frame is empty.
Over the course of this shot the character in frame has a conversation with a character who is not in the frame. The off-balance framing creates a lot of tension until the very end of the scene, where the other character steps into the empty part of the frame and balances the composition.
This little scene showed me that compositions take place not just in space but in time as well. Keeping a frame unbalanced for a period of time can build dramatic tension, and later completing the composition can release it. I’m constantly looking for opportunities to do this.
There’s another style of composition that frames for an object, such as a building or architectural feature, that focuses attention by introducing something else that just doesn’t seem to belong. Imagine a distant shot of the Taj Mahal, symmetrically framed down the center of the reflecting pool, and then introduce a single person into the environment anywhere in the frame. No matter how small that person is, as long as they are visible we will be drawn to look at them because they are the one thing that’s out of place in an otherwise perfectly balanced composition.

WEIGHT DISTRIBUTION

One key advantage of a geared head is that it divorces your mass from the camera’s movement. In the event of the dolly coming to a sudden stop, your body may want to continue down the track. As long as the gear head wheels don’t turn, though, the camera won’t follow your body. This can be more difficult with a fluid head, but it’s definitely possible if you can distribute and brace your weight through three points of contact with the dolly. If you’re sitting, plant your feet firmly, or find a comfortable sitting position, and then put your upper body weight onto your left hand, which should be placed somewhere near the camera (around the base of the fluid head, or the boom arm itself). The idea is that your weight is firmly planted between your legs and that hand resting on the dolly, leaving your panning hand free to operate the camera.
This works in a standing position as well, where your weight is spread out between your legs and your left arm. The right arm, controlling the camera, can do what it wants.
Over time you’ll learn to completely divorce your panning arm from the movements of your body. I’ve gotten to the point where I can operate a 180-degree or greater move on a fluid head while climbing over a dolly. My body does one thing while my panning arm does another.

FEEDBACK

I find that I operate a fluid head better when one hand operates the head and the other is placed around the base of the head, where I can sense panning movement, or on the tripod or dolly. Having that point of reference, either in feeling the head rotate or having a solid surface against which I can judge movement, aids me considerably, particularly on dolly moves where one can become “lost in the move” and not quite know visually what affect your movements are having on the camera because everything is moving.

BODY LANGUAGE IS OUR FRIEND

Human beings often physically telegraph what they are about to do, and over time one can get a feel for an actor’s movements and predict what they may do next, and where.
This works well with sudden movements. I’ve become very good at being able to tell how far an actor will jump, for example, by having an innate sense of how far they can move in one step for someone their height. If an actor is moving suddenly in one direction or another it can be easier to move the camera to where I feel their end point will be rather than try to follow them. For someone like myself, whose reflexes are okay but not great, I can make up for my lack of reflex speed with my excellent sense of timing. Instead of following fast action I often focus on properly timing the start of my move and then moving the camera a set distance at a set speed, based on rehearsals or gut feeling. This works very well, although it takes a certain amount of faith at times.
Most operators will tell you that the hardest shot to execute is someone standing up from a sitting position. This is absolutely true. Practice, practice, practice.

HALF OF OPERATING IS KNOWING WHEN NOT TO MOVE THE CAMERA

Just because you can move the camera doesn’t mean you should. Sometimes the strongest frames are the ones that move the least and allow action to play within their borders.
A lot of this is about body language. I’ve noticed that most people tend to move around a central point: if they’re sitting at a desk, for example, they’ll sit in one position for a while, then lean in across the desk, then lean back, and return to the original position. If they do this fast enough, and you have a wide enough frame, you don’t really have to move the camera. You can let them “play the frame,” although you have to be limber and watch for the unexpected.
“Micro operating” is the habit some operators have of reacting to every small movement, even an eye twitch or slight head turn. This style is appropriate for certain things, and whether you employ this style or the “less is more” style has a lot to do with who you’re working for.
The bottom line, though, is that just because you’re an operator doesn’t mean that you need to move the camera to prove your worth. I once heard a producer complaining to a DP that the grip and electric departments stood around during takes, and he hated that he was paying them to stand around. The DP corrected him: “You’re not paying them to stand around; you’re paying them to do exactly the right thing at the right time.” The same is true of an operator: there’s no shame in not moving the camera as long as your moves are proper when you make them.
My personal style is to find static frames that play for long periods of time, and then when I do move the camera I simply move from one composition to another. This isn’t appropriate for everything and I have to adjust when necessary, but left to my own devices this is the kind of style that I prefer. I call it the “David Lean” approach: the compositions in his films are like paintings, and the camera rarely simply follows someone. When the camera moves it is typically making a transition from one “painting” to another.

WHEN IN DOUBT, KEEP MOVING

There are times when responsiveness is the key to getting a shot, usually in a situation where you’re shooting either very emotional or action-packed material. Keeping your hands moving a little bit on the wheels, in the case of a geared head, or keeping your hand in motion on the pan handle, in the case of a fluid head, can speed up your responsiveness. I learned this trick originally from a sound mixer, who always wiggled his hands on the mixer knobs during takes. I asked him why, and he told me that it is much easier to move your hands quickly in response to a loud noise if they are already moving. If your hands are standing still it can take longer to react. He never wiggled his hands on the knobs enough to affect sound levels, but if he had to turn them quickly his hands were already in motion.
Later I saw camera operators on features and sitcoms doing the same thing: keeping their hands moving on the wheels just a little bit, so their hands were already in motion if they needed to make an adjustment. I’ve discovered the same trick works with fluid heads: by moving my hand around a little bit on the pan handle without moving the camera, my response times increase dramatically.

LEARN THE GEARED HEAD

I really enjoy working with geared heads, although I rarely get to use them anymore. Most of my projects can’t afford to rent one for me. Hopefully this will change with the advent of the Gearnex geared head, which I’ve now used on several shoots.
The geared head offers an incredible amount of control over camera moves, especially dolly moves. For some reason it’s very easy to match pan and tilt speeds to a dolly move by spinning wheels rather than moving a pan handle around. The wheels also offer a wide range of possibilities from very subtle adjustments to aggressive camera moves that stop on a dime.
There are a couple of ways to learn the wheels:
(1) Buy, rent or borrow a geared head and strap a laser pointer to it: learn to write your name in light on a wall.
Although this is the most commonly recommend way of learning the wheels, I’m skeptical of this method as it teaches you to write your name in light on a wall—which is something you’ll never do. In my career—approaching 23 years in the film industry—I’ve only once had to follow text with a geared head, while operating second camera on a feature called “No Way Back.” A gang member spray painted words onto the side of a tunnel, and I had to follow his writing in third gear, with no rehearsal, on an 85mm lens. I nailed it, and I’d never done anything like that before.
So, having said that, I’d recommend skipping this technique and moving on to the next two tricks, which I think will help you considerably more:
(2) Buy, rent or borrow a geared head and strap camera to it: follow people around.
Learning to read, and react to, body language is a huge part of operating a camera. You’ll get a lot farther faster if you learn to follow people around and interpret body movement and language through the wheels than you will simply learning the craft of moving the wheels, which is what the laser pointer technique teaches.
(3) In the absence of a geared head, train your brain to do the right thing.
Around the time that I wanted to learn the geared head I read an interesting scientific study. Two high school basketball teams were told to practice plays in different ways: one physically executed the plays for one hour every day for a week, and the other team thought about executing the plays for one hour every day for a week. In the end both teams improved, and they improved about the same amount. Apparently thinking about executing physical moves can have some practical benefit to actually learning those moves.
At the time I was sporadically practicing my geared head moves while working on a TV series. I was a camera assistant, and at lunch I followed the art department around as they redressed the set. I couldn’t do this consistently, though, and reading about this study gave me an idea.
Whenever I watched TV I moved my hands as if I was operating a geared head and executing the move I saw on TV. As the camera moved on the TV, I moved my hands to follow:
Right hand: clockwise (top of wheel rotates to the right) to tilt up, counterclockwise (top of wheel rotates to the left) to tilt down.
Left hand: counterclockwise (top of wheel rotates away) to pan right, clockwise (top of wheel rotates toward me) to pan left.
After a few weeks of TV practice I did a LOT better the next time I got my hands on a geared head.

SPEEDLITE 430EX II

I consider the 430EX II to be the core of the Canon flash family.
It’s a reasonably priced, fully functional flash that does everything you need a flash to do. As a first flash purchase, I recommend the 430.
It has the focus-assist beam to help you focus in the dark. It can swivel and bounce. It can be used in manual mode with radio triggers, so it makes a great remote slave either with a third-party radio system or with the built-in Canon wireless system.
And although the 430EX II is somewhat less powerful than the larger flashes, I find its smaller size and lighter weight more comfortable for long hours of on-camera flash photography.
I love the 430, and I have lots of them. If you remain a Canon shooter for long, you may end up with lots of them, too.

SPEEDLITE 320EX

The 320EX is a new flash designed to serve two purposes simultaneously. It’s a traditional flash for still photography, but it also contains a white LED to provide continuous light for shooting video with the new video DSLR’s.
Unfortunately, I found the 320EX to be the worst of both worlds. It was mediocre both as a still flash as as a video light.
As a traditional flash, it lacks the focus-assist beam, the manual power mode, and the automatic zoom head found on the larger flashes (you can zoom it manually—if you remember to.)
As a video light, its LED is only useful in fairly dark situations. It can’t provide enough fill light to overcome even moderate backlight, and for shooting professional-looking video it’s not an option. (However, it could be a lifesaver in a truly dark setting where you suddenly needed to shoot some video.)
I find that when I’m shooting video, I need stronger lights, and when I’m shooting stills, I need a more capable flash.
So I sold my 320EX on eBay and used the money toward another 430EX II.

SPEEDLITE 270EX II

Starting with the least expensive flash, the 270EX II is a “mini” Speedlite that lacks some of the key functions found in the larger flashes.
It has no infrared focus-assist beam to help you focus in the dark (instead it does that annoying strobe thing), and while it can tilt to bounce from a ceiling, it cannot swivel from side to side.
It lacks a manual power mode, so even though it can serve as a remote TTL slave using the Canon wireless (light-based) signaling system, it cannot be used with third-party radio triggers.
Given these limitations, I see only three situations where the 270EX II makes sense:
1. You need some quick fill flash on one of the professional cameras (5D, 1D, etc.) that lack a built-in pop-up flash. The 270 makes a great replacement for that missing flash.
2. You have one of the small G-series Canon cameras that has a flash hot-shoe, but which would be overwhelmed by the size of a full Speedlite.
3. You need a very lightweight or very inconspicuous flash for some reason.
Otherwise, I suggest moving up to one of the full-size flashes.

Read more: http://digital-photography-school.com/choosing-the-best-canon-speedlite-flash-for-your-needs#ixzz1yBRTg5ye

Minimizing the need for sensor cleaning
The best way to clean the sensor is, of course, not to get it dirty in the first place! While it’s not really possible to totally eliminate sensor dust, there are some things you can do to minimize it.
Dust gets into the camera when you change lenses, so it’s wise to be cautious when changing lenses, especially in dusty conditions. You can change lenses quickly, with the camera pointing downwards for example. If you must change lenses in very dusty conditions, you can do so in a protected environment, such as inside your car rather than outside, or even inside a protective plastic bag. Another alternative if you know the conditions are going to be bad is to choose a wide to telephoto zoom, which may minimize the number of lens changes that you need.

The software solution
Quite a few cameras have a software based “dust deletion” feature. These generally work by first taking a blank frame which the camera uses to record the position of any dust particles on the sensor. This information can then be used (normally during RAW processing) to automatically clone out dust spots on the image. If you’re stuck in the field without the chance to do a sensor cleaning and you know you have a problem, then using this software solution can save you a lot of work later manually cloning out each dust spot on each image.

The commercial solution
If you’re really worried about damaging the sensor you can find service centers that will do it for you. Some camera manufacturers will do it for free (at least for a new camera), though of course for most users that means shipping the camera off and waiting a week or more for it to be returned (plus you’ll pay shipping costs). A number of camera stores and independent repair centers will also clean sensors with a cost somewhere in the $30-$50 range being typical. Some may do a good job, others not so good. In general, I’d recommend doing it yourself because it’s much faster, more convenient and in most cases cheaper. However, if you decide not to then commercial cleaning is available.

What’s the worst that can happen
The worst that can happen is that you scratch the sensor while attempting to clean it. If you are careful and you use professional cleaning tools this is highly unlikely. Scratching can occur if you get a small piece of grit on the tissue you use to wipe the sensor. Commercial products for sensor cleaning are made in clean rooms and are very unlikely to be contaminated. A typical book of lens tissues is certainly more likely to be contaminated. They are cheaper, but the risk of damage is higher. The sensor covering filters isn’t especially delicate, in fact it’s similar to the coated filters you’d use on a lens, but even so it can be scratched.
If you do scratch the sensor (or more accurately the front of the filter stack that covers the sensor), you’ll get a black line on every image and the filter over the sensor (or in some cases the whole sensor assembly) will have to be replaced. This is a job for the factory service center and will cost several hundred dollars for most cameras. This is clearly not desirable and for older digital SLRs it may not even make economic sense.

Wiping dust off the sensor
If the specs on the sensor are still there after a high tech brush cleaning of the sensor, the final “nuclear option” is to clean the sensor with tissue and a solvent. Again there are companies who specialize in providing materials designed for this task. One such company is PhotoSol (www.photosol.com) who have a line of solvents and tissues (Sensor Swabs) marketed under the “Eclipse” name. Again the advantage of dealing with a company which produces products designated for digital sensor cleaning is that you can get technical support from them and their products are guaranteed to cause no harm when used as specified. Cleanliness is paramount when using swabs and cleaning fluids. Use the swabs only once and use the minimum amount of solvent required to dampen the swab. Pressure is generally not needed (and may be counterproductive), so a gentle wipe across the sensor is the way to go. After one wipe check the sensor and only repeat if necessary. As I said earlier, there’s no point in trying to remove every last minute speck of dust. If nothing shows up in real images, the sensor is clean enough.
Personally, I use conventional lens tissue and methanol to clean my sensors, but again I have experience and I’m willing to take the risk. So far I’ve had no problems, but I’d recommend going the commercial product route to anyone who is at all nervous about sensor damage.

Back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and photographers used totally mechanical cameras, it was common to have a camera serviced every few years. The springs in the shutter assembly had to be adjusted to keep shutter speeds accurate and various parts of the camera and lens could need lubrication. A CLA (clean, lubricate and adjust) was something that kept a camera in top condition.

In today’s world of electronic auto-everything cameras, we recommend only minimal cleaning, which we’ll cover shortly. The most important thing is to try to avoid the need to clean in the first place. Try to keep your camera away from the elements that cause the most harm: dirt, dust, sandy grit, and saltwater spray are the mortal enemies of most types of cameras. Keep your camera protected if you’re on a windy beach and the sand is flying. Don’t get too near those big waves to take the picture of your nephew frolicking in the surf. Use your zoom lens instead.

Read more at New York Institute of Photography - Camera Maintenance | Camera Cleaning | Microfiber Cleaning Cloth | NYIP http://www.nyip.com/ezine/techtips/tuneup.html#ixzz1r08YnQza

Particularly if you have plans for a summer vacation, family reunion, or other big event in the coming months, it makes sense to stock up on memory cards ahead of time. Don’t wait to buy them at airports or expensive tourist stores — if you do that, you’ll pay much more than you would from a photo specialty store or online vendor.

Read more at New York Institute of Photography - Camera Maintenance | Camera Cleaning | Microfiber Cleaning Cloth | NYIP http://www.nyip.com/ezine/techtips/tuneup.html#ixzz1r08Fu6pW

Metro Camera Service Inc. is an authorized repair facility for:

Sony, Nikon, Canon, Fuji, Samsung t.v, Sharp, Bogan, Photogenic, Norman and other manufacturers.

Metro Repair has recently become authorized to service Sony , LG,and Samsung Lcd, DLP, and other televisions

If you are not familiar with our company and your first contact with us is online: We would be pleased to hear from you! Please let us know what your needs and questions are, we will be more than happy to help.

Metro repairs a variety of items.

We are currently servicing digital cameras, point and shoot as well as DSLR’s.We also repair Canon, Samsung and Sharp Office products, in and out of warranty.

You can reach us at [303-934-2471] and by fax at [303-935-5854]. We are looking forward to hearing from you. You can also contact us at our e-mail address:

Custserv@metrocamera.com or Metrocam@metrocamera.co

Our business is located at 330 W. Hampden Ave Englewood, Co 80110

Our regular customers particularly value our prompt and personalized service.