How To Shoot Screens

How to Shoot Screens

by William Lulow

If you do any corporate photography, products or rooms, you often need to shoot information on a screen or computer. In order to do this, you need to understand that video or film on a screen is moving at a certain number of “frames-per-second.” It is not an actual picture. Even still images on a screen are not actual images, but they are “painted”, if you will, by a cathode ray tube to create the illusion of a still photograph.  

The best way to do this is to synchronize your shutter speed with the speed of the video (usually 24 frames per second).  You can experiment with f/stop and shutter speed combinations until you get the proper exposure. If you can figure out the frames per second, you can then adjust your lens aperture accordingly. If you are shooting a computer screen, you may need to slow your shutter speed down to 1/15^th or even 1/10^th of a second so that you don’t get any horizontal lines on the screen as the monitor “paints” the image you need.

Another helpful hint about these kinds of images is that you want to keep extraneous or any ambient light off the screens because it will wash out the image and because it will often result in unwanted reflections. For this reason, you usually need to turn off any extra illumination in the room itself. You may, in some cases

When using slow shutter speeds, it is necessary to use a tripod.

Here’s an example of a screen shot during a corporate conference. The exposure was 1/15^th of a second at f/2.8. You can see that the screen is actually shaded.

The other thing you need to keep in mind is that the light from a computer screen, say or a camera’s LCD is considerably weaker than any normal room light. So, you would need to allow more light into the camera to record the screen properly. If you open up the lens’ aperture, you would then overexpose the entire shot. The solution is to slow the shutter speed down enough to let the “ambient” light from the screen to influence the image. You would need to darken the room to be able to see the effects. If you are using electronic flash with modeling lights, they would have to be turned off so that the camera would “see” the flash which would illuminate the whole product and the slow shutter speed would “paint” in light from its screen.

Here’s an example:

Even though this shot looks like it was shot with studio lights on, it was actually made with all the lights off and shades drawn. The exposure was something like ISO 100, f/11 @1/8^th of a second. The slow shutter speed allows the screen’s light and image to be visible.

So whenever you want to add ambient light to whatever you are shooting, you most likely need to slow your shutter speed down. This usually requires the use of a tripod to steady the camera. It’s a kind of photograph you need to think about before actually doing it.

Here’s another example of a “portrait” done in a Zoom session due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the fact that this person was hundreds of miles away:

The same techniques applied here. Camera was on a tripod. Exposure was f/5.6 @ 1/30th of a second, ISO 400.