Hand-held means small enough to be held and used in one hand. A hand-held device.
In filming it means the camera is carried rather than mounted, which shows in the picture. A hand-held shot is used deliberately to make a scene feel unsteady and immediate.
1adjectivehand-heldSmall enough to be held and used in one hand.
“The hand-held scanner read every barcode in the warehouse.”
hand-held is a quality.
Hand plus held; the term spread with portable electronics in the twentieth century.
From hand + held.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA