Fifteen years ago I was shooting film – and laughing with my colleagues at the inferiority of digital imaging. Today, I’m waiting for my brand to come out with a 1080p, high-Megapixel unit for me to continue my doctoral research documentary with. While I wait for my brand to cough up the goods (I’ve got too much invested in glass to make a switch), I use the competition’s better option (borrowed) to film hour-long interviews and document my subjects as they go about their daily lives.
A week ago I had a play with the new Nikon D3s and found its low-light shooting capabilities to be truly amazing. You can read about it on Rob Galbraith’s site. The D3s is going to be great for press photographers – they can capture 720p movies on the fly (good enough for web and some TV broadcast) and pull print-quality stills from the video thanks to the new JPEG capture mode that Nikon is using. The new Canon 1D Mark IV also promises to be impressive in low-light. Though I haven’t had a play with it, I like that it captures video in 1080p.
Exciting as this all is, it’s turning into a big problem for organizers of events who count on revenue from securing broadcast rights for big-budget cable TV companies. If newspaper, wire and independent shooters are now making broadcast-quality video from events and publishing them online, those exclusive broadcast rights are worth nothing (if you’re interested in the effects of the Internet on TV advertising, here’s an interesting article from Adbusters). One option may be to recognize the new DSLR HD capabilities and limit the amount of video that can be published from DSLR HD photojournalists who are not affiliated with broadcast TV. But I think it will be difficult to monitor or control.
In the meantime, anyone serious about staying in the business of photojournalism should be familiar with video capture. In the US, mostly because of convergence, photojournalists have been training up for and shooting in video for over a decade. Australia is just waking up to the change.