Camera set up advice?

[Mark Suszko]

Directly above your setup, you may want a black surface to reduce any ghosting or glare onto the screen. Softlight boxes would be my choice to light this, again, being careful of throwing up reflections.

Use the green underneath only if you know you want to key in lots of other things. The potential problem with the green right under the device is, your hands coming into frame will throw shadows onto that and spoil the keys. I know some guys shooting demos of phones mount them to a heavy duty gobo arm in mid-air, and their “backdrop” is the floor several feet below, which enables some depth-of-field blurring. A hand can pretend to hold the device, but the gobo arm keeps it anchored in the frame.

[Jonathan Alsop]

Thanks for the insight into different set ups.

I certainly see what you mean regarding reflections, in fact this is one of the biggest problems of shooting screens in general. We tend to (again possibly not the best way of doing this) place a reflector directly above our set up, which helps slightly.

I do like your idea of having a metal arm holding the phone and using the floor as a backdrop, this is not something I had previously considered.

Really what I want to do is downscale the set up though. As in the video link I posted you can see basically a mini tripod and a webcam. I would want to implement something like this that I can hook up to a computer directly and capture the footage. I would want the camera to be professional quality, maybe a DSLR attached to a mini tripod. I don’t know what others think of this?

Cheers

[Mark Suszko]

If you can live without the greenscreen thing, I would suggest a “modest” setup would be one of those pop-up light tents that ebay sellers use for shooting small items like jewelry. Lights shine on the cube from the outside. You get a soft, even light inside, from all directions. It all fits on a table, leave the front open for your arm to get in there and work the screen. Add black paper to the “roof” on the inside of one of these to kill refections, and cut a hole in that black card for the lens of your little webcam or POV cam to poke thru.

Another way to go would be to adapt an old photog’s copy stand or enlargement table: those are dirt cheap to get used these days. Throw away the enlarger head and us the table and associated lighting and mounting arms to mount the downward-facing camera, For years, I used something like this for my super-8 film animation stand.