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Clubs, bars, and small venues are the places where most concert and live music photographers get their start, the reason being that there are fewer restrictions since the performers are less likely to...
I guess to care about “convergence” you have to care about both of the two things that are converging. It’s tough to care about peanut butter cups if you only like chocolate or you only like peanut butter.
“Convergence,” of course, is the oddly appropriate buzzword for putting video in DSLRs, and/or being able to extract still photographs out of video data streams. There are now two brand-new, just-announced, dew-still-on-the-rose digital SLRs with video capability—the Nikon D90 and the Canon EOS 5D Mark II (I’m going to write it “5DII,” only briefly registering annoyance, yet again, at Canon’s naming ineptitude), and of course there is the great Goliath in the East, rosy as the dawn, peeking at us, winking, from the far horizon—the Red Digital Cinema Scarlet, a camera so far from my ken and interest that I might as well go review a new kind of tank.
It appears that there are types of pros who care very much about the convergence, because their clients want video and they want to be able to give it to them. Anything that helps at least a few photographers stay employed is not something I’m going argue with. Convergence is a good thing. For them what wants it.
The right moment is sometimes better than all the moments. Sunrise is too slow for video.
I probably shouldn’t squawk about it, but I’m a critic, and squawking is what we do. I’m just going to throw it out there that this seems to me to be one more way in which the need for being competitive is going to be a burden to photographers who already have enough to do. How you’re supposed to shoot video of the bride and groom saying their vows all misty-eyed whilst also shooting still frames of the same peak moment, I don’t know. So on the one hand you’re going to have the capability to offer your clients added value, and that’s good. But on the other hand, it could well be that you’re going to have the obligation to offer your clients added value, and that could be, well, kind of a pain in the old Kerblinka for most of us.
All I know is that the responsibility of bringing home video of an event would tax to the limit my already severely impaired competency to just get the stills. I don’t need video capability; I need an assistant on a second camera, helping me with the regular pictures (you know, the old-fashioned, unmoving ones). Preferably some bright and energetic youngster who doesn’t yet understand how much more talented she/he is than me.
I don’t see how having the responsibility to create both won’t become an intolerable distraction and frustration for many working photographers. As Carl Dahlke pointed out to me, “video is not just an add-on to the machinery. Adding video to a camera is trivial compared to adding video to your workflow. There is way more pre- and post-production effort going into video and also a larger skill set. You have lighting, direction, camera work, sound recording, sound editing, sound mixing, video editing, etc.…”
Are the similarities more similar than the differences are different?
The above is part of the problem with convergence. I know my tone is flip. My other attitude towards it (I can’t say “problem with it,” because I know for some it’s not a problem) is that moving pictures and still pictures have never seemed very closely related to me. Asking a photographer to come back with video is a little like saying to a repertory theater company, can’t you just put on a ballet?
After all, they both just involve a bunch of people on a stage, right?
Hold still: My son's friend Aaron a.k.a. "Mud" ready for the homecoming football game yesterday....
They’re very different art forms. Good cinematography often doesn’t have the same properties and qualities that good photography has, and vice versa. Not only that, but the way we experience motion pictures and stills is very different, I think. The very fact that still photography takes a moment out of the flow of time is one of the things I most like about it. It lets me examine at length and in detail something that, in life, might have been over in an instant; we can examine in depth what might have been a mere glimpse. I stare at a pictures. I like movies like anyone else, but I often feel you can’t really “look” at films.
Someone could make the exact opposite arguments and I don’t think I’d even have any objection. To some people, the two media are on a sort of continuum; those people might shoot video like stills or stills that are cinematic. And some artists don’t have any particular obligation to any one media, and can range across different means of expression. The poet Jim Schley said, in a lecture I attended recently, “Our society is always saying we have to specialize. But who says you can’t be both a poet and a painter? William Blake was both. William Blake was sometimes both on the same page.”
It’s true that photography has “lost” some major figures to brief or long intervals when they’ve been distracted by film. Henri Cartier-Bresson was an assistant to Jean Renoir early in his career; Robert Frank and William Klein both devoted long portions of their careers to making mostly forgettable films.
Then again, as numerous people have pointed out to me, a number of fine directors started out as still photographers—Stanley Kubrick, Ken Russell, Arthur Penn, Zhang Yimou, Gordon Parks. None of those save Parks kept going as both. So who knows? Maybe some great directors of tomorrow will “find themselves” in the video capability of their still cameras, and go on to great things. In fact, it’s probably inevitable—it will happen, at least in a few cases.
Just a camera feature
The one thing I’d hate to see would be if every SLR suddenly had to have video. As we know, electronic products in today’s world aren’t necessarily made to be used; they’re made to be sold. If a buyer wants video on his SLR and won’t buy one without it, then it doesn’t matter if he ever actually uses it or not. And if there are enough such people, then maybe all SLRs will soon offer video, like it or not.
Some people will say there’s nothing wrong with this, and I say, maybe there isn’t. Usually, though, major features begin to demand changes in the way products are designed and configured. The 5DII might be identical to a stills-only DSLR, its video capability invisible if you choose not to use it. I’ll bet that several generations of product from now, changes will have to be made to cameras specifically to accommodate video capability: maybe the handgrip will need to be moved so a better microphone can be mounted; something like that. (I have no idea what it will be, only that it will probably be something.) That’s another reason why I hope a number of still-only cameras survive.
Then again, it’s possible that “convergence” isn’t inevitable. Quadraphonic sound, New Coke, polarized car headlights, APS film, et cetera—the history of technology is littered with orphaned and abandoned “next big things” that were seen as inevitable by someone at some point. Only time will tell.
I’m not “for” or “against” the convergence of video and photography—it’s really only a feature, after all. Some people can use the new tools to their advantage, and it’s good that those folks are going to get what they need.
I have little interest myself, though, personally or professionally. It has always been interesting to me how I change with changes from without. I went from being a photographer to being a “film photographer” to being a “digital photographer” before that settled back down into just plain old “photographer” again, and now it looks like I’m suddenly a “still photographer.” I always was a still photographer, and I still am one. It’s just that now I’ll have to say so—I’ll have to specify the “still” part.
I’ve never really changed. I’m unconverged, and unrepentant. Just a photographer, for better or worse.
From a competitive point of view, more features are how you crush the competition, even if they are of marginal utility. The company with the largest sales can afford more design cost, so they can add the features with minimal loss of profit margin. That's because they are mostly capital (one-time) cost, not per-unit cost. All the smaller companies have less units sold, so they have a higher per-unit capital cost for the same feature, and eventually they just can't keep up.
So, while perhaps Nikon can afford to play "catch up with Canon" in this accelerating feature market, can Pentax/Hoya? Even Nikon took a long time to catch up with Canon on the "full frame" feature, as did Sony. Pentax hasn't gotten to full frame yet.
Unfortunately, for us users, the extra features like video aren't really free.
They can reduce the usability of the user interface.
They may take more hardware, reducing battery life.
They may steal time from the testing of the base features, so that the camera is more buggy. (Do you want a 100% reliable still camera, or a 99.44% reliable still camera that also does video?)
As a newspaper reporter, I'm against video in stills cameras but see it as inevitable. Already, there is talk about reporters - not photographers - being asked to go out with a camera to photograph news events. For the papers' websites, the powers that be would ideally like reporters to also take video for online news reports.
How the hell are you supposed to write a story to a tight deadline whilst uploading digital images and then video? In my own company, young reporters are already taking their own headshots when doing vox pops.
And yet, the Minolta A2 I used to use had a video facility and I can honestly say it never got in the way at all. I'm pretty sure the feature will be similarly invisible in both the Nikon and Canon and I can't see any reason why this arrangement can't continue in future.
Geez, you made us wait long enough mike!... just kidding....mostly=)
I think this is kinda a who cares topic, true it could hurt the effectiveness and ease of use of still cameras, but that's evolution. We try things and some work out, some don't. The important thing is that tech companies keep churning out new ideas and don't get stuck in neutral.
Personally I don't want to increase cost on dlsr's, but obvisouly some ppl do... and those ppl make the cameras so we're probably getting hosed if you know what i mean.
on a side note, I hope you reconsider doing gear "reviews" again, I realize it's a hassle to deal with the haters (for lack of a better word), but I think that talking aboot gear is fun.... my argument sounded more compelling in my head.... thanks and keep'em coming.
The perceived convergence will depend on the answers to many currently open questions, some of which are: How will this new form of media be consumed? I assume we are talking here about video higher in definition than 1080p. Where and in what form do we view this? Maybe advertising on large digital screens? Or are we only using single frames out of the video? How does this fundamentally differ from the traditional use of a motorized photo camera, except for the higher frame rate? That may certainly be useful in some applications but is it much of a paradigm shift that some claim this is?
Video cameraman have always envied the image quality of still cameras in the same price range as our video cameras. Convergence means I can pick a still frame from my video clip and use it if I want as a still. My HD camcorder produces still pictures on par with a 3mp still camera. If I'm shooting a news story for TV and I want to sell a still image to the newspaper too, I can do that. Convergence gives me more options.
Photojournalists can crank off 180 frames with a 'convergence' camera and then pick the most dramatic point in the sequence (or the point at which no one is blinking). I can see huge benefit to sports and wildlife shooting straight off the bat.
No one is forcing still photographers to shoot video or vice-versa. The option is there. What we should be pondering is how convergence will benefit each discipline in and of its own. If you use both video and still cameras, it's a financial boon to only need one camera from now on.
I think high-end still cameras like the Leica and Canon 1d series will continue to cater to professional *photographers*, and remain video free. If convergence creates/sustains a niche market for highly tuned, well crafted, dedicated still cameras, I'm all for it.
Philosophically, I'm sad they chose to add video to the 5D 2, but since I only have a lowly 5D, it doesn't affect me.
I hope convergence continues. I love it. I wish my Canon G3 did video! It's sooo cool that the 5D MkII does video. SUPER WIDE ANGLE! NARROW DEPTH OF FIELD! REAL HD! TILT SHIFT! Can't beat it!
, October 21, 2008; 08:01 P.M.