Put a video camera in the hands of a teenage boy and one of the first things he will do is shoot a bunch of footage in near darkness. Put the same camera in the hands of his teenage sister and one of the first things she will do is turn the camera sideways and upside down. Such fun -- just let me out of the room when we have to view this junk -- it's roughly equivalent to a child baking his or her first cake with it's soggy middle and chocolate all over the kitchen.

Most of us struggled through 12 or more years of school where we were required to create essays for evaluation by our teachers. Back the papers would come with red marks all over them correcting grammar, spelling and suggesting that we didn't really get our point across. A lot of years and a lot of essays later we might feel comfortable putting words on paper.

This isn't the case for creating video. Some schools offer a course or two but rarely have the poor teachers been taught anything about the subject, so how are they supposed to pass much knowledge on to their students? At best the system turns out budding newscasters, great for TV stations who can pick the prettiest face from a huge oversupply of kids who want to chase policemen, but not really useful for all the other commercial and artistic opportunities that are showing up as video moves to hundreds of cable channels, shows up on PC's and soon will be everywhere on the Internet. For examples, visit our web page at http://www.videokitchen.com

This booklet is not for those who want to shoot video commercially. Most people (by a huge factor) simply want to create good videos for fun and family just as many of us who aspire to be great chefs have absolutely no intention of ever darkening to door of the kitchen in a commercial restaurant. Unlike great or bad meals, however, a video will likely be around for many years and in some cases will be viewed by generations of unborn grandchildren who may judge you unfairly if your video-making skills are inferior.

So now I've scared you a little, I don't want you to run from your video camera. Instead I hope you feel challenged to jump in and start to master the subject. Like any subject, your skills improve with practice, practice, practice. You are in control. You can (and should) throw away your junk footage. Plan on letting the world see maybe as little as one-sixth of what you shoot and you'll have much more fun.

If you were making a Hollywood movie, you would need a script, professional actors, and a support team of dozens or hundreds of people to manage everything from lighting and staging to snacks and insurance for the crew. If you were shooting a documentary, you'd need a story line, a point of view, an argument that you'd want to show and prove. Much the same can be said for videos that sell, train or record for posterity a defined event or staged production. But here you are, you have a camera, want to shoot video, but don't have any of this working for you. What are you to do, leave it in the closet? No, but you do need to go about your task with some "do's and don'ts" in mind.