Zoom with your video camcorder

Home camcorders often boast great zoom capabilities as one of their main selling points. Granted, a telephoto lens has a lot of great uses, but on a practical level, you'll be using a wide-angle lens more often, especially in small places, which is pretty much anywhere indoors.

Trying to get a good close-up using the zoom lens is difficult because a long lens has a shallow depth of field. This makes it difficult to keep everything in focus. Also, if the camera can't easily tell what to focus on, it will drive you insane and in and out, which can completely ruin your video.

Another thing that makes close-up zoom a bad idea is that in a telephoto zoom setup, camera movement seems magnified, giving professionals sarcastically what we call earthquake video, spastic camera, and vomit-inducing effects. An enlarged shot may look so unstable that you have to judge it on the Richter scale!

So ... I'm sorry to be the one to tell you, but your zoom lens is of minimal use. That's not to say that a good shot, focused on the zoom tripod, CANNOT look good - it just isn't as easy as it sounds.

To make your magnified shots look professional, you MUST use a tripod (or something as a substitute). Even on a tripod, camera shake often ruins a fully zoomed shot, so hold the tripod tight and pray so the wind doesn't blow. The longer the zoom, the more shaky it will look and the more difficult it will be to focus.

A full-zoom autofocus lens can have an impossible time trying to figure out what to focus on if there are multiple possibilities in your shot. To avoid that problem, make sure that nothing in the foreground or zoom background images is close enough to the center of the frame to confuse your camera.

A professional-looking zoom will be slow, steady, and smooth. Beginners tend to shake the camera a lot and zoom in on everything as fast as the lens. Doing so will mark you as an amateur faster than anything else. Slow down and let the automatic zoom slide smoothly to a logical resting place. In other words, when you're done zooming in, the shot should be well framed and not just in the center of whatever you're zooming into.

Constantly zooming in and out is BAD TECHNICAL. There's really no discussion about it, but rookies tend to argue anyway. Generally speaking, it is much better to cut from a panoramic shot to a close-up than to zoom in. Watch TV if you don't believe me. You will NEVER see a lot of zooms on a professional TV show.

So for all the camcorder vendors working at the local big box store, learn more about how to record video and you will stop bragging about a zoom zoom lens!