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 shootAnd 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 |
Posted by 70-96-165-108-DSL-PDX.hei.net on September 17, 2009 at 03:29 AM EST #
Posted by crowdson on September 17, 2009 at 04:22 AM EST #
Uh huh. Thought so.
Posted by 208.72.80.242 on September 17, 2009 at 05:07 AM EST #
1) that professional photographers worked for many many years without autofocus and produced amazing images. Measuring the validity of the process by 'autofocus' is a rather absurd.
2) The significance of this method is not anything to do with the RED ONE camera, but rather to hi-res motion-picture cameras used to extract and produce still images; be it RED ONE or some other camera. Invariably auto-focus will be come a part of this process, thats a given, as other cameras move into this sphere. It just happened to be RED int his case.
2) If a celebrated photo artist the likes of Annie Leibowitz can and has made it work then who are we to suggest that it cant...?
Now we just wait and watch the old-school photogs bitch and moan on with some crap about how this method 'kills the art of photography"... yeah, whatever.
Needless to say the comment about strobes is pretty stupid :) Of course you wouldnt use strobes; you would light like a film shoot.
Posted by Mike Jones on September 19, 2009 at 12:31 PM EST #
Stills usually want a much higher shutter speed than the usual 1/48th 1/50th or 1/60th of a second that the various film video conventions demand.
You can shoot 24FPS (or faster) and using a higher shutter speed for each frame but the the motion blur and the temporal perception totally changes. Maybe we'll get used to it one day, but for the moment I think people won't like it.
jb
Posted by John Brawley on October 01, 2009 at 04:00 PM EST #
The flood gate is open. Once the method has been proven as viable then it's inevitable that more and more photographers will try it. And when that hits a critical mass it will be legitimized and ultimately mainstreamed - regardless of aesthetic hang-ups..
But like I said, what i find most interesting is not the 'aesthetics' of the image result of this technique but the notion that such an inversion - using a moving camera for stills - is a far more radical and paradigm shifting step than using a stills camera for movies; which seems to be getting all the press of late.
Cheers
Mike
Posted by Mike Jones on October 02, 2009 at 12:08 AM EST #
It seems a fad to me. They'll get bored with the bulk and general unwieldiness of motion picture gear and yearn for their light and easily held in one hand DSLR's
John (about to start an 8 week series handholding a RED) Brawley
Posted by John Brawley on October 08, 2009 at 10:17 PM EST #