SnapperTalk

The march of multimedia into the field of stills photography continues ever-onwards…

Sion Touhig has two interesting articles about the use of High-Definition video cameras by stills photographers entitled 30 FPS Motordrive and The Decisive Moment, R.I.P? The first article is based on this informative piece on the Photo District News site, carrying interviews with some U.S. staff newspaper photographers who are already shooting this way such as David Leeson from the Dallas Morning News, who seems to be a bit of a pioneer in this field.

If you want to see the sort of gear he’s talking about, take a look at these reviews of the high-end Sony HVR-Z1, mid-range HVR-A1 or lower-end Sony HDR-HC3 camcorders. All are capable of shooting 1080i - that’s 1920 x 1080 pixels at 30 frames-per-second - and the latter can shoot stills at 2304 x 1728 pixels (4MP).

I don’t think the equipment is quite there yet to be able to replace stills cameras for the majority of photojournalistic work, but as the megapixel race continues at incredible speed, it can be only a matter of time. If anyone out there knows of some links to sample images from these cameras - both frame-grabs and stills, I’d be interested to see.

This thread in the SportsShooter forums has a long user discussion about the use of multimedia slideshow application Soundslides, including many examples of recent work.

With so many photographer’s websites being created in Flash, it is worth noting that Adobe have released version 9 of the Flash Player, which is supposedly significantly faster than previous versions, amongst other improvements.