Observers | Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India | Dec 2007

We’ve talked about the encroaching convergence of video and still photography before, and now we’re starting to see it happen.

The bigger question: will device and process convergence change our notion of a “photograph”?

Remember that cultural change lags technological change…

• John Harrington, Lotsa Little Things Are Actually Really Big Deals:

  The magazine world is turning upside down. Video is becoming stills, and ad revenues are slashing frequencies of publication. While it’s cool to see Esquire innovating like that, we predicted the Red Camera would do just this just over a year ago – One more nail in the coffin (3/18/07), with sports being in the cross-hairs. Now that a COVER was done, doing inside pieces are now demonstrably a piece of cake, and events (yes, that means sports, for sure) that are regularly covered by TV will find red cameras being used to allow for you to be able to choose the best moment in time.

• Jason Kottke, Moving photography:
  

  As resolution rises & prices fall on video cameras and hard drive space, memory, and video editing capabilities increase on PCs, I suspect that in 5-10 years, photography will largely involve pointing video cameras at things and finding the best images in the editing phase. Professional photographers already take hundreds or thousands of shots during the course of a shoot like this, so it’s not such a huge shift for them. The photographer’s exact set of duties has always been malleable; the recent shift from film processing in the darkroom to the digital darkroom is only the most recent example.

  An interesting example:

  Flickr encourages their members to think of short videos as long photos. When he guest edited kottke.org last year, Deron Bauman wrote about short video as a contemporary version of the photograph. Matt Jones argued that looping short video is the real long photography. So maybe the photograph of 10 years from now might not even be a still image.

• Chase Jarvis, RED ONE Camera Shoots Esquire Magazine Cover:
  

  I’ve been yelping about photo and video convergence since long before the Nikon D90 and the Canon 5d, so it’s nice to see the support for these claims just keep on rolling in. For example, Esquire magazine today announced that the June 2009 issue of their rather glorious magazine (on sale May 10) features Megan Fox on its cover, and more importantly, that the image was captured with a video camera. Yes. That’s right the REDone’s 4k image is the first I know of to be sitting nicely on the front cover of a high-end, public-at-large magazine.

  “It allowed her to act,” Williams says. “She could run scenes without being reminded by the sound of a shutter every four seconds that I was taking a picture. As in still photography, a lot of it is capturing unexpected moments. This takes that one step further.”

  Rest assured that using the RED to take magazine covers is just a test, a sample, a start of people finding ways to use still images, moving images, print and web in interesting and profitable combinations.

  The better question: how will culture respond to the changing technology?