Indoor video with Canon T2i 'kit' lens
Channel: andycivil
Date: 2012-03-02

I wanted to see how practical it is to take video inside with only natural light and the kit lens.

I've chosen the best location in my house for shooting: I have a nice picture window, and snow on the ground outside. It's not sunny today, but there's still a nice flood of natural light; it reflects somewhat on the ceiling here. My subject will sit over there opposite the window.

Here is my Canon T2i camera with its kit lens.

At ISO 400, with the maximum aperture of 3.5 and the longest shutter speed of 1/30th, a measurement tells me that I have plenty (that's two stops or more) of excess light to play with.

So let's see what I could do with this extra light, if I wanted some control over the shooting parameters. Well, the first thing I could do is to reduce the aperture to 6.3. This might be wise if I felt my subject might move backwards or forwards during the interview. Alternatively, I could shorten the shutter speed to 1/125th for slightly sharper movement.

This isn't a constant F-stop lens, so another way to use up this extra light is to zoom in. The mandatory change in f-stop reflects the fact that less light is being captured by the lens. It also matters whether your subject is light or dark in colour. Note that if I try to video the dark bookcase, suddenly I find that I'm actually underexposed.

OK lets try this with a real subject, meet Nico my cat. Nico is small, so I have to use my light allowance to zoom in on him. I feel that this scene is adequate, but you could argue that the detail of his face is lost because it's so dark and therefore underexposed. So as an experiment, let's relax our standards on ISO and bump the sensitivity up to ISO800. That's better, My dark subject is now fully detailed and ready to be interviewed.

My conclusion is that using the kit lens is quite practical for video indoors, but you do need to manage your lighting, and the colour of your subject. And you will feel that you're up against the edge light-wise, with little wiggle room for any creative effects.