DW: Questions on lighting.

1. Auto exposure - When the camcorder takes care of fluctuating light levels by automatically adjusting the lens aperture in order to keep the same light level.


2. Backlight - A control on the camera that opens the iris in order to expose and bring light to dark or shadowed areas, it may overexpose the lightest areas of the scene, but at lest the subject if properly exposed.
3. Ways that you can control exposure manually:

•  Reducing or increasing the aperture of your camera will enable you to experiment with the tonal levels and free you from using additional light sources if you are shooting in poor light.
• Depth of field can also impact the light exposure in your scene, large aperture will create a shallow depth of field i.e. subject in focus quite close to the camera, whereas a small aperture will create a deep depth of field and the subject in the shot will be in focus at a longer distance.

4.The basic shooting modes:

• Colour slow shutter. Keeps the shutter open for longer to let in more light, but blurs movement and produces a "trailing" effect.
• Night mode. Also gives you a brighter picture if you're shooting in low light, although it can result in jerky movements as the shutter remains open for longer.
• Infrared night mode. This mode will shoot in total darkness, giving a green tinge to footage and a "negative effect".

5.You  may need to adjust the white balance if you are quickly filming from indoors to outdoors, in which case there might be a delayed colour shift on the camera, which can look poor. By changing the white balance you are essentially telling the camera what the colour should look like.