HV20 Experiment 1: Film Setup, No Gain, No Cell Phone Trick

Today I ran an experiment to push the HV20 to give me optimal film settings with the narrowest depth of field without a lens adapter. In other words, I wanted to see what I could get using just the camera itself.

After reading an excellent post by the author (handle: Aramis) of the Canon Elura guide (elurauser.com) over at the hv20 boards I decided to forego Barry Green’s “cell phone trick” (with all respect intact) and thus CineMode, and instead lock the shutter speed at 1/48th using TVMode instead.

Here is the reasoning Aramis provides:

“I find Barry’s article unnecessary complex and convoluted. I believe that there is no reason of pointing to light source. What for? Need to read current aperture? Press the photo button. Need to set aperture? Select Tv mode, choose shutter speed, then lock exposure and adjust to your liking, checking current aperture with photo button. Not enough EV range? Well, in this case you can point to a dark area or, conversely, to a bright light source just to set a different baseline for built-in light meter, then lock exposure. Then you can adjust exposure and the range will be different, but what is the point of shifting the range, say, to smaller apertures if you shoot in low light? You won’t see anything.”

I locked the exposure to give me as open an iris as possible without adding electronic gain – in this case – 2.4 (-8 EXP). Anything above that setting showed a redundant 2.4 on the display and thus I assumed I was moving into digital gain territory (ie. -9 gave me 2.6, -8 gave me 2.4, -7 and above also showed 2.4). I based this on a diagram which displays that the largest aperture at full zoom for HV20 is is f/3.0. (Fig. 1.1)

Taking this into consideration, I decided to attempt an optical zoom that was at neither extreme. Most discussions thus far have concerning locking the exposure and shutter involve the camera being zoom all the way in or all the way out. A little restrictive by any definition.

By playing with the optical zoom to compress the foreground and background I was able to blur the background more while keeping the foreground in sharp focus and vice versa; using nothing more than the fidgety little focus ring, I got some excellent rack focus going between the distant foreground and background. The results are terrific. I got a very narrow depth of field, 1/48th shutter, a nice wide open iris at 2.4 and no electronic gain (ie.as little noise as possible).

The scene is lit with various “practicals”; (an upright halogen light from K-Mart, 40-watt energy saver bulb in a glass brick from IKEA, and, most importantly, a 500W Lowel V Light bouncing off the ceiling. I also used a gold reflector to balance out the dark side of my face. Without enough light this shot would have been impossible.

The experiment proved that I can control my shutter, exposure and focus, achieving a very narrow depth of field with just a few simple steps and nothing more than the Canon HV20 and in this case the Canon wide angle lens attached (and lots of light!)

Shutter 1/48th (TVMode 48)
Exp: 2.4 (-9 gain, exp lock)
Manual Focus
HD 24p

Pics and vi(m)deo coming soon!