Video is becoming a more acceptable and popular medium every day as the equipment falls in price and the internet demands it. For the first ten years of my career I was busy working on book projects, now those same publishers are falling into bankruptcy as well as the book stores that sell them, leaving me and many other pros with the large hole in our market. I believe video will have an important roll in filling that void of demand for nature photography.

So I have been asking myself, Is it possible to take compelling still images while filming video?  I have made a valiant effort over the last year and the interesting part of my experience has been learning why still images are so very different than video.

In my journey, I have figured a way to export a still image out of the high definition video I’m capturing, but this technical allowance is much simpler than the creative challenge of composing for and working in the realm of motion vs still.

Capturing the decisive moment as coined by French photographer Catier Bresson has been my inspiration for years while studying photography whether it be journalism or nature, color or black and white.  There is that time when all the elements in a moment in time line up directly in front of you! That is when, if your eyes are open and a camera is in hand, a great image can be made.

Please Log In or Sign Up for a FREE Silver Account to access the rest of this article or others on ProPhotoResource.com{rokaccess !guest} However, creating that moment in video is done very differently, so I have learned while shooting nature. The scene is taken from as many angles as possible, the camera is moving, panning, zooming or all three at once. Then the clips are taken into post for editing and the moment is magically created over the course of time.  It is this timeline that becomes the challenge for a still photographer. 

As a photographer, I see compositions and then wait for the moment. As a videographer, I think the timeline and then shoot the scenes to best portray the sequence of events.

Composition and light are of the most important in stills. Time and light are the most important in video. It is this flip of the priorities that makes the challenge of being creative with both stills and video at the same time. What will be compromised during the shoot is the constant question.

I have tried the new Canon 5dM11 which has the ability to capture a full high resolution still by the press of a button, in the middle of a video clip. The problem is the video clip is stopped for that split second making the entire scene unusable, unless edited back together. This could become a big problem if the scene needs to be live through that period of time when the video stops for 2 seconds to capture the still.  I have had better luck with my video camera, the Sony EX1, and exporting stills out of the video clip. This way I have the entire clip with no breaks and I can grap any still I want.

However, the problem with this method is the lack of resolution. The Sony only yields the equivalent of a 1mp image file from the video, leaving me with the option of a very small print. There are other differences between the two cameras technically with the single largest hurdle for shooting the Canon being the lack of manual override while shooting video.

This is simply not acceptable in professional video. However, the potential for the still camera becoming a video camera or vice versa has become and we all know the answer is coming and in two, three of more years and the cameras will be morphed into one that does it all. However, the creative challenge will remain. What will be compromised or what will not be compromised must be delt with during every shoot. My plan is to continue working on integrating composition while not sacrificing the timeline. Of course as you see in the equation, light is always one of the key elements and must remain uncompromised.

Below are some stills taken from video I have shot on Catalina Island for a 5 minute piece I am working on for the Catalina Island Conservancy. To create the panos, I simply took a pan with the video camera knowing I would take stills out and stitch those stills together later in post.

© Marc Muench {/rokaccesss}