Getting into Videography: My First Six Months
What I learned after picking up a Sony ZV-E10, shooting a lot of bad footage, and slowly figuring out what I was doing wrong.
I had been shooting photos casually for years — mostly travel stuff, mostly nothing anyone would want to look at twice. Video always felt like a different beast. The camera was the same; the skill set was entirely not. When my kids started enjoying the footage we shot on family trips more than the photos, I decided it was time to learn properly.
I picked up a Sony ZV-E10 as an entry point. It’s a dedicated content creation camera, which is a slightly embarrassing category until you actually use one. The vlogging flip screen, the clean HDMI out, the decent autofocus — all the things Sony bolted on for YouTubers are genuinely useful for anyone who wants to shoot handheld and not think too hard about whether they’re in focus. I paired it with the kit lens to start, then added a Sigma 16mm f/1.4 for anything that needed low light or a slightly more cinematic look.
The first six months were mostly about making mistakes at a reasonable pace. I learned that flat picture profiles and S-Log look terrible until you colour grade them, that a cheap variable ND filter causes a cross pattern at narrow apertures, and that audio is at least a third of the result. A Rode Wireless GO II changed my footage more than any lens purchase. I also discovered that 4K footage compressed twice by YouTube looks almost identical to 1080p — something nobody tells you when you’re deep in a rabbit hole about sensor crop factors.
The payoff has been real, though. Footage from a trip to Portugal last spring is something the whole family actually enjoys watching. I’ve started experimenting with short documentary-style edits — capturing a whole weekend project in 90 seconds with a voiceover.
It turns out video is a lot like coding: you keep iterating until the output looks like what you imagined. The gap between the two just takes longer to close.