One of my favorite images of this year…do we need to see the before andafter or is it just better this way?

Today Nikon announced the new Nikon D3s. I was expecting a new semi pro camera something between the D3x and the D700, a high resolution camera with with aprox. 20 megapixel at a affordable price.

Dreamer..the D3s is a 12.1 megapixel camera with great ISO values. The big surprise was, it takes video. Why not,  this is the ongoing discussion in the mediacenters at big events. All photographers are talking about the two worlds getting closer to each other. Honestly I’m not so sure.

Recently at an event the organizer hired a film crew who  worked on the water and up in the air without gyroscope. I never getseasick no matter how big the waves are but the outcome by watching this movie I almost got seasick, this TV crew was simply useless.  Now everyone believes that videos out of the still camera will change the market. I’m really questioning that.

I doo like changes and I take changes as a chance to do business but this time I have my doubts. Today in the yachting photography we are trying out so new angles to get more dynamics in to the images (have a look at this one), when I used the D3x in Singapore for the Volvo Ocean race felt the freedom to crop the image and this was a real new way of working. I didn’t bought the D3x as I believe it’s simply too expensive to go out on the saltwater with such a camera. This explains why I’m waiting for the Nikon semipro with 20 megapixel.

For the home/family use a camera doing also video is great but do we really need that in the PRO world? Are the good still moment similar as the good video moments? I think not. For the daily use on websites and agencies for the press this may be a solution. Two weeks ago Lynn, Daniel and I we just finished the book of the Voiles de Saint-Tropez and we have been very hard on us to choose the images for the book. Many of them are unique moments where the before and after doesn’t really matters. It’s rather a split moment captured who also gives you a bit of interpretation freedom about the before or the after who makes the image better.

Question: What is more sensual a beautiful women completely naked or dressed with a shirt where you can’t see anything but imagination goes wild?. Isn’t a video different from sill image? Browsing in the web about video and the still discussion I found a post from APhotoEditor he believes that top shots with a good headline are more successful as videos. On top it takes much longer to get the video edited and up on the web as a image.

What do you think about this?

Juerg