Some Camera Acessories

Fisheye Lenses: An extreme example of a converter is the fisheye lens. Curved to a horizontal viewing angle of nearly 125 degrees, this attachment creates a high degree of barrel distortion, exaggerating the depth of scenes by pulling nearby objects closer and receding distant objects to the background. Used with lightweight digital cameras, this unique perspective often lends a sense of drama or excitement sporting events, action shots, and point of view footage from surveillance equipment.

Aquatic Housings: A number of companies design and manufacture water-proof aluminum housings for shooting video in undersea depths of up to 450 feet. Once you submerge a DV camera, however, you begin to lose proper light levels and esperience shifts in the color spectrum. For this reason many divers also use special aquatic lights, optics, and correction filters to increase color intensity and boost luminosity. Most water proof camera housing features mechanical controls that help you operate the camera functions without getting moisture into your camcorder.

Transvideo Handheld Prompter: The folks at TransVideo took their popular mattebox setup and replaced the heavy steel support rods with lightweight carbon equals, attached a 6-inch monitor to the front housing screws, and gave it some semi-reflective glass. The result is the versatile 4-pound Transvideo Handheld Prompter, ideal for crews using . Attached to a Canon XL-1, the entire system (monitor, prompter, and mattebox) weighs less than 13 pounds. Designed to work in full sunlight without a hood, the teleprompter allows the use of filters. The composite and VGA (60-Hz.) monitor can accept signals from any laptop and flip the image left, right, and upside down-necessary to view the mirrored text in the display glass. The Transvideo monitor can also be equipped with a wireless receiver and battery pack, making the same equipment useful as a client monitor on set.

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