Quality or convenience

Today my family and friends went on a bike tour of Shark Valley in the Everglades. The seven and half mile paved trail runs alongside a canal littered with alligators. I really wanted to take my professional video camera and gather some footage of the gators, but I opted for the small consumer video camera called the flip. The flip can fit in my back pocket and I would not have to worry about protecting it from the elements if a thunderstorm occurred (South Florida is known for sudden down pours).

Unfortunately, the trade off resulted in some ugly video. The flip is an auto focus fixed lens camera with digital zoom. The flip is great for close static shots with out a lot of movement. Once you add distance and movement, the video get very pixilated. The reason is a combination of auto focus and the digital zoom. First, the auto focus gets confused in an environment that has a lot of movement. I was trying to shoot video of a swimming alligator while saw grass and tree braches in the foreground and the background blew in the wind. The autofocus does not know on which subject it should focus, therefore, the camera attempts to focus on all of these moving elements resulting in blurry video. The second factor that can ruin good video shots is digital zoom. Let me explain the difference between optical zoom and digital zoom. Optical zoom uses the lens to bring the subject closer without a loss in quality, digital zoom simulates optical zoom by cropping the image and enlarging it electronically. This is just like zooming in on a picture in an image-editing program; the image gets pixilated the larger you make it.


The solution is to use a camera that has manual focus and optical zoom. Most consumer DV cameras allow you to focus manually. Here is how to focus correctly, first get as close as you can to your subject without losing the composition of your shot. Next zoom into the subject and adjust the lens until the object is in focus. Then zoom back out to where you framed your shot. I also could have moved closer to my subject, but alligators can run very fast for a short distance. In one of the shots, you can clearly hear my wife shouting at me as the alligator swam directly towards me only a few feet away.