Originally Posted by Stephan Ahonen

I take it you're referring to this shot: http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com/06/en/...aid=189149&d=1

Notice his feet are sitting on the ground, he's just kicking himself around. The hands are too busy zooming and focusing to bother with yet another control.

One unusual thing I noticed is all these european camera operators have their lens controls backwards. All the camera ops I know control zoom with the right hand and focus with the left. I'm curious as to how the europeans came to do it their way, especially since on older lenses with crank-operated zoom (that's right, no servo zoom, just a big crank. You'd be suprised at how many trucks still don't have servo zooms, and a lot of operators prefer it that way!) the cables for the zoom and focus enter the lens in a way that you would need to awkwardly cross the cables over each other to do it the "european" way.

It also doesn't make sense because if you're running handheld you're pretty much are forced to zoom with your right hand and focus with your left, so if you switch between handheld and hard cameras a lot I can't imagine it would be very easy to adapt.