Really?! This is funny AND sad.

keylight

keylight

Veteran
In an article on Popular Photography titled How Is Ultra-High-Resolution Video Capture Changing Photography? I found this start to the article amusing. And really a bit sad:

There's a video going around the web today that's basically a commercial for Canon's new 1D C cinema camera. It makes the case that, with 4K capture in the camera, shooters can essentially roll video and just pull the moment they want from the footage rather than taking still photos. The video itself is staffed with some big name cinematographers like Philip Bloom, as well as some high end photographers and it's causing a bit of an uproar.
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I get why you find it alarming, but photogaphers have long been in the practice of taking a rapid sequence of pics during shoots. That's really all video is, just faster.
 
Well the RED has had this capability for a while...not sure why the uproar is coming now. Photographers have been shooting 4K video (now 5K) and taking frames they like and editing them just like normal.

I saw the 1DC video and they were pretty clear while the image quality wasn't anywhere near what it could be, it printed ok. Even so, the quality isn't up to par with a nice huge RAW image from a 5D or the 1DC's photo mode. Other then RED, as far as I know, the tech just isn't there yet.
 
keylight said:
In an article on Popular Photography titled How Is Ultra-High-Resolution Video Capture Changing Photography? I found this start to the article amusing. And really a bit sad:
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Ever taken 'pet pictures' as a 'pro'... I actually thought of this a while back, but the resolution was too low for 'direct to photo'. However, the resolution was good for the Wife to put in to Painter and 'fancy up' to an artistic rendering of the pet in question...

I'm pretty sure it would work for babies and small children who never seem to sit still, and often are a pain to shoot to get a shot the parents 'love'...

And as a note, that's were one would want a rather high shutter speed rather than the usual 1/48th or even 1/60th, perhaps more like above 250 or so...
 
I can understand why this would cause an uproar, as this might seem to take some of the skill out of photography. But personally I find this a lot less dangerous than things like photoshop and other editing tools which change the very nature of photography all-together.
 
jghenderson said:
But personally I find this a lot less dangerous than things like photoshop and other editing tools which change the very nature of photography all-together.
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And yet, all the great photographs I see have had minimal treatment beyond processing.
 
So it's basically a higher burst mode...

I don't see as cheating. In my eyes photography isn't about capturing that one moment, so much as capturing it in a beautiful way. Composition, lighting, framing... this is what constitutes a great photograph.
 
As both an active still photographer and video producer I don't foresee still photography and video ever being melded together (not for professional applications at least) If you handed a professional still photographer a camera and told them they had to use constant light they would be at a major disadvantage for many different types of photographic work. Yes, there are situations where you can take stills using just ambient light, however, more often than not there are advantages to using strobes or speedlights. Strobes afford photographers the ability to shoot fast shutter speeds indoors as well as balancing natural sunlight when shooting outdoors. The amount of power you get out of a strobe or even speedlight would be incredibly impractable in a contant light not to mention you would fry your talent or ruin the ambiance at a wedding for example. Even if sensors in cameras got good enough where you could shoot at 1/200-1/2000th second shutters speeds and not sacrafice noise or DR, you are still going to be limiting by the types of light setups that you could only achieve by using strobes because of their short flash durations and power level. Autofocus is also a critical feature when taking stills. When a photo is going to be printed to poster size at 300DPI you better hope that you have perfectly sharp focus on the subjects eyes (or wherever you want) not just what is often considered acceptable focus in the video world. It's not always good enough to have to look through thousands of frames and hope that you captured the desired talents expressions in tac sharp focus. Shooting in what is essentially JPEG mode doesn't concern me as much since many still photographers get it right in camera so they shoot JPEG and don't even bother with RAW.

The above is just speaking to the idea of a still photographer recording video instead of pressing the shutter button. If you are thinking that still photographers aren't even needed because you can just pull frame grabs from video then you have to consider that there is an inherently conflicting stylistic standard which is that video is shot at a shutter speed of 1/48th 1/60th previously mentioned and photos of people are typically taken at 1/200th shutter speed or faster depending on focal length and subject matter. Video and Photography and very closely related but there is a differnt approach to each which won't be changed by the type of camera used.
 
KyleProhaska said:
Other then RED, as far as I know, the tech just isn't there yet.
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Even with Red, the technology isn't there yet, despite what the hype machine would have you believe.

There are bad side effects of this whole concept - the whole form factor/ergonomics of the current generation of Red cameras ("DSMC") has been compromised for cinematographers (thousands of users) in order to make it a plausible stills camera for those half dozen or so still photographers in the world who actually use it that way (and it still sucks for that use anyway).
 
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