How to Shoot Outdoors with a Canon XH A1

"Now I'll give you some tips about shooting outdoors or in daylight. This is basically assuming that you're in the manual mode and setting your settings yourself. I'll just give you a quick couple of pointers. First off, is the most important thing to know about when shooting outside is you have this 'ND' filter right here. That stands for neutral density filter. Basically, you switch it on and your picture gets a lot darker. What this is useful for is in daylight, if you're in the shade, but you're outside, you'll probably want to set it to 1/6. Then your picture will get a lot darker, and then you can set your aperture right here. If you're in direct sunlight, you probably want to set it to the last setting 1/32, and it's going to get even darker, but it's so bright outside that you need this. If it's just off, even when you close the Iris all the way, it can still be really bright. So, definitely start with your ND filter if you're outside. Then you want to go to your Iris ring and adjust right here. One other tip is that, maybe, you want to set your shutter speed a little higher. The lower the shutter speed number, the more light that's getting in, and when you start setting it up higher, the picture is going to get darker and basically, help you set a good picture for shooting outdoors. So, that's a little bit about a couple of tips of getting your pictures set when you're outdoors. Definitely use the ND filter. It comes in very handy, I pretty much always have it on if I'm shooting outdoors in the sun or even on a cloudy day or in the shade you're going to need it."