Check this thread out on the Sports Shooter site - Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci tells how his recent coverage of the anti-war demonstration in Washington DC, marked the first time that AP has moved frame grabs on the wire from a still photographers video camera, which were sent out along with a video piece cut to deadline.
His member gallery has a couple of examples of the frames sent out.
In 1994, the Associated Press collaborated with Kodak to produce the NC2000, a 1.3 megapixel digital camera producing images 1024x1280 pixels big.
Only 9 months later the Vancouver Sun became the first newspaper to abandon film and go 'all digital'.
Even with its huge limitations, the NC2000 was used by photographers to produce multi-column images for broadsheet newspapers and even a few magazine covers...with a SMALLER imaging chip than (1920x1080) current HDV video-cameras.
Photographers have gone from making 1.3 megapixel images to 16 megapixel images, in 13 years...development of HDV-cams, is supersonic by comparison. The new Red HD video camera, which is already in production (for about the same cost as the NC2000 when it was released), has a 12 megapixel imaging chip - roughly the same size as a Canon 1Ds stills camera.
That's twice the resolution of the multimillion-dollar HD cameras used to shoot the recent Star Wars films, so a double page magazine spread should be a doddle.
Like I've said before, this isn't the death knell for photojournalism. The NC2000 got images in the paper, on deadline, and all the chin-scratching about whether it was 'real' photography was irrelevant, and even seems quaint now.
If anything, its simply an alternate version of that 'ooh, nice picture - you must have a good camera' line used by photo-numpties.
These developments are making me think hard about what my role as a 'photo' journalist is now, and what its ultimate purpose is. If you see the ultimate purpose of photojournalism as satisfying yourself as a photographer, then we're gonna have to agree to disagree. It's obviously part of the process, but self-satisfaction is not the aim, its a by-product.
So I'm looking at video as a 'value added' aspect of my role, for a medium - the Web - that is separate from paper, has different requirements and even audiences.
It can actually cut both ways - I've barely started using video, but anyone seeing video as a medium simply for screengrabbing is making a big mistake. I've been commissioned by a paper to shoot an assignment that I don't even think is actually obtainable with photography, but IS possible with video...and I'd have never suggested that to them, if I couldn't actually produce the video.
Because the mediums are NOT the same.
Sion you are so right, the 2 mediums are quite different
Posted by: John Armstrong-Millar | February 20, 2007 at 09:21 AM