Shooting Video Outdoors

Shooting outdoors is a challenge, because so many things can't be controlled. First and foremost, controlling the light is difficult. The quality of light provided by the sun changes during the course of the day, and you never know when a stray cloud will wander in front of your main light source. If the sun is bright, it casts strong shadows and forces people to squint, neither of which you want in your video.

Power can be very hard to come by when shooting outdoors. You can rent a generator or batterypowered lights, but this scale of production tends to be out of the range of most podcasts. You're probably going to have to make due with what you can carry and the light that is available. Bounce boards are invaluable when shooting outdoors, because you can use them to reflect the light from the sun and use it as a secondary light source.

Noise also is a big problem. You can't tell the world to be quiet, unfortunately, and you can't tell the wind to stop blowing. Fortunately, windsocks have been developed that you place over microphones to minimize wind noise. They look like big pieces of wooly foam and do a fantastic job. If you're going to do lots of outdoors work, windsocks are a necessity.