Camera skills, interview techniques and essential safety tips – this one day workshop will cover what you need to know before setting off as a one-man- or one-woman-band video journalist.

The session will focus on cross-platform camera skills to help you get the best picture and sound quality for your story, and to make sure you get the most out of your equipment.

Setting off on assignment can leave you with a daunting to do list and there will invariable be challenges and obstacles once you are in the field. This workshop will help you to plan ahead, think about what you’ll need to take with you, and teach you to create time for your story rather than your logistics.

Find out all that you need in your video journalist’s toolkit from veteran freelance cameraman and Frontline Club founder, Vaughan Smith.

What you’ll learn:

• Getting to grips with your video camera: setting, composition and framing
• Shooting sequences: how to tell stories and follow the action
• Lighting, audio and interview techniques
• What to pack
• Finding the stories
• Safety and digital security tips

Watch Smith’s report Blood and Dust, documenting 10 days of life and death on a US Medevac helicopter in Afghanistan, for which he won the 2011 Prix Bayeux in the grand format television category.

The deaths of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros in Libya in late April were a grim reminder of the dangers that journalists face in covering conflicts like the one that has been raging in Libya.

Getting the best images possible means that photographers and video journalists in particular need to get hair-raisingly close to the action, often putting themselves in danger.

Reuters photographer Andrew Winning and video journalist Inigo Gilmore will speak at the Frontline Club about shooting on Libya’s front line. Presentations of their work will be followed by a panel discussion and Q&A about the reality of covering events in Libya. The talk will be moderated by multimedia photojournalist John D McHugh.

British photographer Andrew Winning has been working for Reuters for 15 years. Twelve of these he spent in Mexico as the chief photographer there. He specialises in hard news, covering natural disasters, political and civil unrest as well as editing assignments and sports. Libya is only the second armed conflict he has covered, the other being President Aristide’s ousting in Haiti.

Haiti has also been a key country in Inigo Gilmore‘s career. After the 2010 earthquake, Gilmore covered the aftermath of the disaster for Channel 4, tracing the journey of an injured baby to a hospital in the UK and the eventual reunion with her mother. His films about baby Landina won him the RTS Television Journalism Independent Award.

John D McHugh‘s career spans the gap between photojournalist and filmmaker. His multimedia work from Afghanistan won him the 2007 Frontline Award and in the past he has worked for the Associated Press, The Guardian, Channel 4, Al Jazeera and Agence-France Presse. McHugh‘s experiences of embedding in Afghanistan with US, Canadian and Afghan troops has given him well-rounded insights on a very different kind of war. He spoke at the Frontline Club in 2009 about his work in Afghanistan. McHugh recently made a film about Bahrain during the Arab Spring, and has just returned from a month in Kandahar.

David Levene spoke at the Frontline Club on Friday to Roger Tooth, head of photography for the Guardian, about videoing and photographing the earthquake in Haiti. We were joined live from Port-au-Prince by Inigo Gilmore, who reported in the aftermath of the earthquake for Channel 4.

If you missed the event you can watch it here.

Upon his return from Haiti, David Levene put together an exhibition and print sale of his work from both before and after the earthquake in aid of the Disasters Emergency Committee’s Haiti Earthquake Appeal. You can view some of David’s pictures in the Guardian gallery here. Prints can still be ordered by contacting picture.syndication@guardian.co.uk