Mike Jones Digital Basin
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Using a Movie camera for Stills is more significant than using a Still camera for Movies

Why Capture the moment when you can Select it..?

This seems to be the question some high-profile still photographers are asking themselves. Why work with a camera whose mechanics are based around the idea of 'capturing' a moment plucked from the air - a snapshot - when you can simply hit REC on a video camera, capture 24+ photos every second and then, at will, select and choose any of the captured moments you wish? Up until this point, the factor preventing this mindset was Resolution - the fact that still image resolutions are very high and moving image resolutions are very low. But the times they have a changed....

Reports from a recent Vanity Fair shoot is that famed Photographer Annie Leibovitz shot a session with Tina Fey not on the usual assortment of Canon and Nikon digital SLR's but rather with a RED ONE. The process..?
1) Press REC.
2) direct the subject in real-time to pose.
3) Press Stop.
4) Import the footage and from the 4k rushes pluck out the 'moments' you want from the 24+/sec you have availible.

And photogrpahy will never be the same....

Whilst an argument that the resolution of of RED at 4k is still not anywhere near the native resolution of high-end DSLR's (let alone Digital mid-Format) there are two things that must be remembered - 1) that with a 35k RED sensor on the way this argument has a short shelf-life. And 2) How much reoslution do you REALLY need for a magazine shoot and for website publishing. 4K from a  RAW image might struggle if you need to blow up to a large framed print or billboard but it  is certainly plenty for just about any print-publishing purpose.

Photography in this way becomes not a process of timing, reflex and moment-capturing but rather a distinctly different mechanic more akin to selection and image isolation.

Whilst much of the discussion about the convergence of Still and Motion image acquistion has focused on Still cameras shooting Moving images; I'm inclined to suggest that  moves - such as those by Canon with their 7D HD DSLR - to use a still camera to shoot movies are not anywhere near so significant as using a Movie camera to shoot Stills. The former simply changes the tool to do the same job whereas the later changes the entire cretaive process and premise of Photogrpahy itself.

At this link you can see some of the images captured for the Tina Fey shoot

And Here you can see soem info about a similar shoot involving Bruce Willis

Posted at 10:23AM Sep 15, 2009 by Mike Jones in industry comment  |  Comments[7]