You may have heard that the worlds of photography & videography have aligned somewhat under the shadow of HD video.
Or you may have been living in a cave.
The release of the now infamous Canon 5DmkII, which as well as fundamentally being a mint stills camera with silly high resolution & rather good low light performance, allows photographers to shoot HD 1080p video. The thing that made this special was the quality of the footage, which when shot through wide aperture photographic lenses, created a fantastic shallow depth of field effect. The mkII’s full-frame sensor produces razor sharp subjects in front of creamy soft backgrounds; and this is difficult to reproduce on anything less than SUPER expensive video cameras. Suddenly videographers took notice, and in floods they’ve run to the shops and laid out £3K+ for a mkII & a bunch of spendy L-Series lenses.
Since then, photographers and videographers have produced all sorts of fantastic (and terrible) movies (with a large amount of owners spending an impressive amount of time moaning about the cameras shortfalls rather than filming stuff!). Two worlds of creative peoples have basically been given each others gear and told to go figure. Praise be for Google! Google be thy game!
The stand out movie that starting the ball rolling was Vincent Laforet, who made this – the first mkII video ‘Reverie’:
Nice eh? Then came along Philip Bloom, who’s become Canon’s right hand man & has made a whole host of cool vids. Check his batch here.
He’s become a 5dmkII guru, and has shot some lovely movies – including this film, called ‘Sofia’s People’ [all shot with on nikon mount 50mm 1.4 lens]
Wedding videography has suddenly been catapulted forwards, such as by the Aussie Shadowplay team, fusing wedding video & stills:
Or the Fusion is Now team’s first fun wedding vid (which I can only find in this size):
Most recent debate in the DSLR videography world has been about complicated workflow issues and not being able to shoot at 24/25p, which plays on UK DVDs & TVS. Conveniently, the Canon 7D popped up to say “hey, check me, I shoot 24/25p!”. It’s lovely, but isn’t full-frame, so not quite so suited to pro photography and the 30p doesn’t match the 5dmkIIs 30p.
So, Canon stirred the hive again with the release of 1DmkIV that’s come out, which shoot fantastically in low low light.
As soon as a pre-production model hit the hands of Vincent Laforet, he made ‘Nocturne’ – all shot in natural light and pretty much all shot at 6400ISO:
This video was for some reason asked to be temporarily taken down by Canon, but it’s still showing on YouTube, so it may go from here.
But beautiful eh? The noise & low light performance is insane – almost bordering on being better in low light than the naked eye! That’ll be a revolution for us wedding togs, spending most of time shooting indoors in low light. The crack in the 1DmkIV is that it also isn’t a full framer (it has a 1.3x crop), and what most of us are interested in is what Canon will throw at the full-frame 1DSmkIV – the top of the Canon tree. Though no doubt it’ll have a £6K+ body only tag fluttering from it in a a noiseless razor-thin depth of field.
So that’s it really – it’s fascinating seeing what technology has done in the hands of the worlds creative individuals. I don’t think my video work this far (such My first wedding video, In Bruges Too, Wardrobe’s 10th Birthday) stands up to these kids, but watch this space as my video contributions develop! I’ve made friends with a bunch of fantastic video dudes who’ve found themselves buying and fiddling with 5DmkIIs and the paradigm shift has happened! Times have changed, and it’s all about embracing the revolution.
Exciting times hey?