I recently bought a camcorder to film me and my family. I noticed shortly after buying it that filming in strong sunlight caused a little too much reflection, so i bought a cir-polarizing filter.
But the most striking thing I've noticed is the difference in quality between filming outdoors and filming indoors. A tripod makes the images look even better, so much so in fact that from an outdoor shot to indoors with a tripod my subjects can look like two different people!
How is this possible and what can I do to make my outdoor shots look as flattering as indoor shots? And, if this is a silly question, which is more true to life-indoors or outdoors?
Hard to say what your problem is - do you have motion stablizing turned on? Is the video over-exposed? Some camcorders even have a 'Human skin beautifier' these days that blur the skin-tone to make them more... beautiful!
All these camcorder features modify the actual image. Actually, there's probably more, but I've just woken up :)
I'm using a sony analogue camcorder, model CCD-TRV218E...it's pretty new.
I do have the exposure button but it just seems to turn the contrast down, looks like it will be useful in sunlight though.
I have very pale skin and tend to be a lot more flattered indoors- sunlight kind of exaggerates my features or at least strong sunlight in an unflattering way. Between the strong sunlight images and the soft sunlight-indoor images, I look like two different people...it may be a silly question, but which one would be more realistic ie how other people see me? I've also noticed that images look better on a tripod and not when the camera is held by hand (probably cos my family zooms too much and doesn't keep the cam static for long enough.)
I'm going on holiday for my 21st this year so I really want to get the best shots (of one of me, anyway).:)
Thanks for your help
Your camcorder seem free of the weird features I mentioned, so if it's related to the ambient lighting, you can try experimenting with the white-balance and the exposure and see what makes you look the best. :-)
Hope you have a good 21st. Geez that was a long time ago for me...
