Handheld camera

Hand-held camera or hand-held shooting is a filmmaking and video production technique in which a camera is held in the camera operator's hands as opposed to being mounted on a tripod or other base. Hand-held cameras are used because they are conveniently sized for travel and because they allow greater freedom of motion during filming. Newsreel camera operators frequently gathered images using a hand-held camera. Virtually all modern video cameras are small enough for hand-held use, but many professional video cameras are designed specifically for hand-held use such as for electronic news-gathering (ENG), and electronic field production (EFP).

Hand-held camera shots often result in an image that is perceptibly shakier than that of a tripod-mounted camera. Purposeful use of this technique is called shaky camera and can be heightened by the camera operator during filming, or artificially simulated in post-production. To prevent shaky shots, a number of image stabilization technologies have been used on hand-held cameras including optical, digital and mechanical methods. The Steadicam, which is not considered to be a "hand-held" camera, uses a stabilizing mount to make smoother shots.

The first silent film era movie cameras that could be carried by the cameraman were bulky and not very practical to simultaneously support, aim, and crank by hand, yet they were sometimes used in that way by pioneering filmmakers. In the 1890s, brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière developed the fairly compact Cinematograph which could be mounted on a tripod or carried by the cameraman, and it also served as the film projector. In 1908 with a hand-held Lumière camera, Wilbur Wright was filmed flying his aircraft on the outskirts of Paris. Thomas Edison developed a portable film camera in 1896. Polish inventor Kazimierz Prószyński first demonstrated a hand-held film camera in 1898 but it was not reliable.

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