From: John DuMontelle, www.latincam.net

How many times do we find ourselves shooting an interview in a situation where we don’t have access to electricity. All of a sudden we’re stuck with our camera light.

Working in Nicaragua I end up having to shoot a lot of these interviews on remote mountain tops or backwater jungle.

I carry two MAG-LITE flashlights. The big ones with six batteries in them. I cut some diffussion and stuck it behind the lens of each flashlight. Voila! I’ve got two light sources giving off soft even light. Better yet, you can focus them to give you more control! They work great and are light weight. It’s easy to have the correspondent / sound-tech / local poor villager hold the light steady (on the opposite shoulder from your shooting position) while shooting an interview.

It’s an amazing soft light that really makes your video look that much better.

Use one or both lights shooting an interview (depending on time of course). I’ll sometimes use the second light behind the interview subject on the ground or prop it up to throw some different angled light on the background. For longer trips away from power just use one light at a time. Buying D-batteries is usually pretty easy no matter what country you’re in.

My buddy who passed along this tip to me bought the more expensive MAG-LITE w/six rechargable batteries. I keep it simple and just use regular batteries. Just make sure you buy the light with six D-Cell batteries and not one of the shorter ones. You’ll be surprised how long these lights will last!

I’ve tried blue gel to shoot twilight interviews. These flashlights can’t compete with a good HMI or strong/gelled tungston light but when you’re in the middle of nowhere and at the right time late in the afternoon, you can get some pretty twilight interviews or standups.

From: Kim Fatica
Most of us wear the familiar Porta-Brace “saddle bags” around our waists, which we use for all our little gadgets like microphone stands, spare tapes, spare batteries, small cables, a lens cloth, gum, snacks; you name it, we have it. Those hip packs are also useful for keeping your camera steady.

There are many instances where a tripod may not be practical in the day-to-day scramble of general news. Think about the number of times you’ve been in a locker room trying to get post-game sound and everyone around you is shooting over their shoulder while the athlete is sitting down. How about the hundreds of times you’ve tried shooting small children, but all you could see is the tops of their heads? And what about all the times you’ve had to do a bang-bang interview in tight quarters and the tripod was taking up valuable space?

Use those hip packs as a steady bag by resting the shoulder pad of your camera on your hip pack as you are wearing it. You will be able to flip your viewfinder upwards to your face and cradle the camera while it’s resting on your saddle bag. Use your hips and torso to execute slight pan movements. Make sure, though, you have a good, shoulder-wide stance to keep you steady.

This technique is particularly helpful when you need cutaways on the fly, or when you need that creative shot at a press conference instead of the standard stuff.

From: From: Stephen Press, Cameragod

How to do a smoother pan on a tripod on a long lens. Thinking back to my high school physics that secret to doing a smoother pan is all to do with levers. The panhandle sticking out at the back of the tripod head is a long lever. If you pan using it your hand has to travel a long distance to make the camera move a short way, good for moving quickly but giving you more chance of wobbling the camera. If instead you put your hands on the tripod head and push it around with your thumbs, (a shorter lever) you get a much smoother pan. And the teacher thought I was sleeping.