Field Camera Mistakes That Cost You the Shot, and How to Avoid Them

I spent years cutting news packages before I started teaching, and the same problems reached my desk again and again. Almost none of them were dramatic. A shaky pan, a voice buried under traffic, a face lit from the wrong side: each one looked small on location and became a real obstacle once the clock was running towards a deadline.

That is why I like to start field camera training from the edit backwards. When you know what an editor needs, the choices on location become clearer. You stop asking whether a shot looks nice and start asking whether it can be used, whether it will cut with the shot before it, and whether the sound will hold up.

Marcus Whitlock, our lead camera tutor, teaches the shooting side of this. I see what happens afterwards. Between us, we have a fairly complete list of what goes wrong, and the sections below cover the mistakes I would most like trainees to avoid in these autumn weeks, when light and weather change quickly.

The commonest framing mistake is shooting everything at one size. A reporter who comes back with twenty minutes of medium shots has given the editor nothing to build a sequence from. A news package needs a wide shot to set the place, a mid shot to show the action and a close detail to carry emotion or information, and they need to be held long enough to use.

Another habit is moving the camera when nothing asks for it. A zoom or a pan made out of nervousness is almost never usable. If the subject is still, let the frame be still. Hold each shot for a count of ten before you move, and move only when something in front of you moves.

Headroom and eyeline cause quieter trouble. Cutting a person off at the chin, or leaving a large gap above the head, marks a shot as careless. Placing an interviewee centre frame with no space in the direction they face makes the picture feel cramped. These are small corrections, and they become automatic with repetition.

• Shoot wide, mid and close on every subject
• Hold each shot for about ten seconds
• Move the camera only when the subject moves
• Leave looking room in the direction of the eyeline

Automatic settings are tempting on a busy job, and in steady light they are fine. The trouble comes when a subject steps from shade into sun, or when a bright window sits behind an interviewee. The camera chases the change, the picture pumps lighter and darker, and the shot is spoiled in a way no editor can fully repair.

Setting exposure by hand, and checking it on a monitor or zebra pattern rather than your own eye, takes seconds and saves a shot. Do the same with white balance. Mid autumn light moves between cool grey cloud and warm low sun within an hour, and a clip shot at the wrong setting will look orange beside one that looks blue.

When you move location, reset both. It is a dull habit, but it keeps your material consistent, and consistent material is what lets a package look as though it was shot in one place, at one time, by one person.

• Check exposure on a monitor, not by eye alone
• Lock exposure when the subject crosses light changes
• Reset white balance at every new location

Viewers forgive a slightly soft picture far more readily than bad sound. Yet audio is the thing trainees most often leave until last. A microphone clipped to the wrong place, rustling against a jacket, or a recording made beside a road with the wind unprotected, produces material that is tiring to listen to and hard to clean.

Put on headphones before you record and listen for ten seconds. Listen to the voice, but also to the background: a refrigerator hum, a passing bus, a flag cracking in the wind. Often a small move of two or three metres makes the difference between usable and unusable.

Record a short stretch of room tone or ambient sound at each location, because an editor will need it to smooth the joins between clips. Check your levels against peaks as well, so a raised voice does not distort. Good audio capture is mostly a matter of attention rather than equipment.

Handheld work gives you speed and access, and it is the right choice in a crowd or on a moving story. The mistake is using it for everything. A static interview shot handheld drifts and sways, and a viewer feels it even if they cannot name it. If you will be standing in one place for more than a minute or two, set up a tripod.

The opposite error also occurs. Some trainees insist on the tripod and miss the moment while they level it. Learn to brace the camera against your body, to keep your elbows in and to breathe out slowly as you shoot. Bracing against a wall or a car roof steadies a handheld shot a good deal.

Whichever you choose, decide before you start rolling, not halfway through. Changing support in the middle of a scene creates a jump in the picture that is difficult to hide, and it tells the viewer that the shooter was not sure what they wanted.

• Tripod for interviews and anything held longer than a minute
• Handheld for crowds, movement and quick access
• Brace the body or the camera against something solid

The last mistake is a leaving mistake. Under pressure to file, it is easy to pack up without checking that you have what the story needs. I have seen reporters return without a cutaway of the person they interviewed, without the sign that names the building, or without a single clean shot of the place itself.

A short mental list before you go fixes most of this. Do you have your establishing shots, your interview, your cutaways, your ambient sound and a clean wide of the scene? Have you checked that the card recorded and that the clips play back? Two minutes at the end saves a return trip.

In our field camera training we practise this in real locations around Exeter, with a mock deadline, so the habit forms under mild pressure. Trainees often find the checklist feels slow at first and then becomes the part of the job that makes them calm.