How To Shoot Handheld Footage (Smooth Footage Without a Gimbal)

What's up everybody, my name is Alex Chung and today let's dive straight into the first video of the year which is how to get smooth footage handheld without using a gimbal. And the first tip is to have your elbows at your sides. It's one of the most basic techniques when you're shooting handheld and so basically what you want to do is to lock your elbows at your sides and you're sort of squeezing yourself as you're shooting so that way your arms don't really move, your hands don't really move, it reduces the amount of natural micro jitters that you would produce. And for something like a standard shot where you're not moving at all, you're basically like a tripod, like a human tripod. You don't move, you don't pan, you don't tilt, you don't do anything, you just keep your arms at your sides. But for moving shots where you're panning around or doing some tilting action, what you want to do is to move your entire body instead of just moving your hands. Now talking about camera movement, when you are moving your camera around, make sure to do small movements only. But most of the action is going to be coming from your hips and you need to be using your whole body as a tripod or a slider when you're moving and keeping your arms locked to your sides. That's the only way you'll get smooth handheld footage. You don't have the fancy equipment to do insane shots like craning down from the sky or spinning around your subject. You only have your hands and your camera and that's basically it. Now one simple upgrade that I like to make to my handheld rig is to add a camera strap. Now with the strap attached, I basically pull the camera out all the way so that the strap is very tight around my neck and I make sure that whenever I'm moving the camera around, that strap never gets loosened. It's always tight and that provides a lot of stability in your shot. And this is pretty much the only thing that I use to get really good handheld footage. And with the camera strap, it's easy to get a lot of sliding shots, a lot of panning shots and tilting shots because it frees up your arms from being always locked at your sides and now you can move a lot more without worrying that you're going to have a lot of shaky footage. Okay, so moving on to the next tip and this is probably one of my favorite ones is to add a top handle to your camera. And for me, the easiest way to get smooth footage is to hold one hand on the handle and the other hand is cradling the bottom of the camera or lens and that way it gives you the best amount of stability and camera flexibility and control. Now the one that I use that has to be attached to a camera cage but you can also get top handles that attach right onto the cold shoe mount on top of your camera. And when you're shooting with the handle, it's important again to keep your arms locked to your sides. Okay, and the last tip that I have for you guys is to make your camera heavier. And you can do this through a lot of different ways. You can add a battery grip at the end of your camera at the bottom of it. You can also use a camera cage and add an external monitor which is similar to the one that I'm using right now. Oh, look at that. Or you can just use heavier lenses like this Tamron 70D200 right here. Whenever you're using heavier objects, your motions, your movements tend to smooth out a little bit more. You won't get the micro jitters that you'd usually get if you don't rig up your camera. That way your handheld shots actually look really nice and organic. That's it for this video. Those are my tips on how to shoot smoother handheld footage without using a gimbal. If you like this video, leave a like down below. Make sure to subscribe and hit the bell to get notified of every video that I post. My name is Alex Cheung, and I'll see you later. Bye!