“After 11 years of shooting motion and over 30 years of shooting still images, my mind seamlessly makes the switch a hundred times a day between thinking and seeing in ‘moments in time’ or ‘time in motion’”, Gail Mooney shared yesterday in “True Convergence with the DSLR Cameras,” a great blog post from her “Journeys of a Hybrid.” Mooney speaks of how photographers new to video tend to get consumed by the technical challenges and “forget that they need to think and shoot differently when shooting video.”
This is something that I have been struggling with in my very initial steps into video and multimedia. I notice that I either shoot all stills or all motion. My mind is not only not switch seamlessly, it’s hardly switching at all. And when I am in video mode, I hardly know what I’m doing. And why should I? While I’ve been making still images for 20 years, I’ve only played around with multimedia a tiny bit over the past year. How would I know how to make a movie?
To make a movie. That’s the real challenge of photographers “moving into motion”: embracing video capture, as well as audio capture, as well as the editing these element together, or even “just” editing still images and sound into multimedia pieces. This “move making” factor might seem incredibly obvious, but I think few of us really realize this.
Maybe you realize this. But if you do, do you really realize this?
I ask because I recently finished up a 4,000-word article sharing photographers’ insights on embracing video and multimedia and, as good as the article is — I’ll share it with you when I have the PDF — I think I fail to communicate this obvious-subtle idea: Moving into motion is all about making movies, and making movies is hard.
Because of all the TV programs and movies we consume, we have a sense of how movies work, which is great. But, just as casual photographers Continue reading “It’s Making Movies, Stupid!”
