Nikon D7000 manual 171

Chapter 6 ■ Live View and D-Movies 171

Figure 6.13

Movie shooting requires you to fit all your sub- jects into a hor- izontally oriented frame.

■Wasted space at the sides. Moving in to frame the basketball player as outlined by the yellow box in Figure 6.13, means that you’re still forced to leave a lot of empty space on either side. (Of course, you can fill that space with other people and/or interesting stuff, but that defeats your intent of concentrating on your main sub- ject.) So when faced with some types of subjects in a horizontal frame, you can be creative, or move in really tight. For example, if I was willing to give up the “height” aspect of my composition, I could have framed the shot as shown by the green box in the figure, and wasted less of the image area at either side of the model. The least

attractive option is to switch to a movie recording format that has less “wide-screen” perspective, specifically 640 ⋅ 424 pixels, in which case you lose the resolution advantage of the HD aspect ratio.

■Seamless (or seamed) transitions. Unless you’re telling a picture story with a photo essay, still pictures often stand alone. But with movies, each of your compositions must relate to the shot that preceded it, and the one that follows. It can be jarring to jump from a long shot to a tight close-up unless the director—you—is very cre- ative. Another common error is the “jump cut” in which successive shots vary only slightly in camera angle, making it appear that the main subject has “jumped” from one place to another. (Although everyone from French New Wave director Jean- Luc Goddard to Guy Ritchie—Madonna’s ex—have used jump cuts effectively in their films.) The rule of thumb is to vary the camera angle by at least 30 degrees between shots to make it appear to be seamless. Unless you prefer that your images flaunt convention and appear to be “seamy.”