I have been following the blog of
Brent Foster for about a year now. He works similar to me, that being that he works in photography and film as well.
Lately, there has been a new breakthrough in DSLR technology. We can now do video with the same DSLR body and lenses we use for photography. For people like
Brent and myself this is amazing!
Yesterday
Canon announced that it will be updating it's firmware for video on the 5D Mark II so that users can use manual control instead of the hindering automatic functions it now has. This new firmware will allow users to control the aperture, shutter speed and gain (ISO) and we hope that it offers 1080 24p as well.
This is a major breakthrough for people who are working in photography and film. I couldn't be more excited to have these options available to me.
I have always been interested in multimedia photography ever since i was first introduced to in by my friend Justin in late 2006. I started reading blogs like
Multimedia Shooter and studying classes from
Mindy McAdams at the University of Florida.
For me, i think multimedia is not just the use of sound and photography. Sometimes i see people who add music to some images and they say they have made a multimedia.
I apologize to those people. I'm sure they worked very hard on what they did, but to me, it is not really giving justice to the tools available to them.
Multimedia is the use of photography, film and sound (interviews, ambient sound, music) so that they are all being harnessed to take advantage of the power each media form gives. This lets the viewer become closer to the story and understand more.
Photography Vs. Multimedia. One is not better than the other. They are just tools like in a construction workers tool belt. They each serves a different purpose.
We can now start see we have more demand from clients and newspapers to do video. There is new technology to do this from DSLR manufactures and we have this new way to present our stories and photography. So, my question to photographers is this:
Why are you waiting for?!
Other people are catching on and not just in the photojournalism area. You can see fashion photographers (
Steven Klein, NYC &
Esquire Magazine June Cover) starting to do both photography and film using
The RED system and the 5D Mark II.
Almost every newspaper in America and Europe ask their photographers to do video as well as photography.
This is not a fad. This is the direction our industry is going. So come... on jump on.... it is only bumpy in the beginning.
