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The Difference Between Film and Digital Photography (Video)
Sally Wiener Grotta and her husband Daniel wrote some of the first books and articles about digital photography. Sally was an award-winning photographer in film days, and has maintained her reputation in the digital imaging age. In this interview, she talks about how to buy a digital camera -- including the radical idea that most people really don't need to spend more than $200 to take quality photos. (We had some bandwidth problems while doing this remote interview, but the sound is clear so we decided to run it "as is" rather than try to remake the video and lose the original's spontaneity.)
We're nerds. Not blind consumer-sheep. We want to know what she thinks, how the sensors work, what makes the cameras good. We don't want to know that the interviewer has a smartphone with an integrated camera, and that he's about to buy his new camera as a phone from BestBuy because he dropped his old camera.
This is a professional here, stop thinking you know *anything* about the intricacies of her job and show some respect. Imagine interviewing Linus or Wozniak and telling them that you're going to buy a new keyboard because you spilled coffee on the old one. Then asking them for recommendations on what brand of bluetooth keyboard you should get to go with your $120 tablet. I'm surprised she didn't hang up out of sheer frustration.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
Grotta is not a particularly innocent word either. I'll quote the first sentence of the swedish wikipedia article after passing it through google translate.
"A [Grotta] is a natural cavity, large enough for a man to penetrate in."
Taking advantage of the conversation audio was probably much better than trying to reshoot it while reading off a transcript. Good call there. That said, cutting from video of a person to a similarly framed still of a person is not a big improvement from a cinematic perspective. If you want to do more of these, and you want something to show when the video goes wonkey, you should get some other cutaway material. A great example in this case would have been some stills from her portfolio, Ken Burns style, with some simple annotations of what we are seeing. Another easy option would be occasional reaction shots of the interviewer. Obviously, you have4 complete control over that half of the connection so you can always capture decent quality video on your side. (It's a good excuse to clean up your bedroom, if nothing else.) You could also have images of the things that are being talked about. Pictures of cameras, screenshots of software, etc. At around 10:30, you say "I will have this cheapie as a spare" as you cut away from the video. Would have been perfect to cut away to a shot of the cheapie tos how what was being talked about. Or a shot from the cheapie. Etc.
And of course if you have more technical interviewees, you can ask them to record video of themselves on the call and send it to you after, while you have an audio Skype call for the interview. You can spend as long as you need downloading the already recorded video after the fact.
That said, good job providing the transcript below the video. Excellent model to follow.
At this point dSLRs should only be used by professionals,
Thank you for pointing out your beliefs that only certain people should be able to use certain products.
I read that not so much as 'should be able to' as 'will be able to benefit from'.
Or, in other words, unless you really know what you're doing, you're probably wasting your money.
For myself, I tend to buy the cheapest item available of any category until I understand why the other ones are more expensive.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
I'm not a professional photographer, but I do not like point-and-shoot cameras, shutter lag, limit of lens choices (actually no choice just the one), terrible f-stop range, terrible noise on sensors, tiny sensors, and they are way too light to be able to make steady shots, and not seeing through the lens at what you're shooting is totally weird with the electronic lag of CCD to LCD display.
With a DSLR I can shoot with very high shutter speeds, having the ability to change lenses allows me to get either macro close or very far objects closer up. You can also clip on filters to change the image, like polarisers.
Most people will not need a DSLR, but to claim that those cameras are only for professionals is rubbish. Even a cheap DSLR will out do a point-and-shoot. And let's not even get into thiny pinhead size sensors in mobile phones and claim that it's genuinely 8MP+.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I liked what she had to say, especially: "The camera doesn't take the picture, the human does." -- that's very important. It's always been possible to take *great* photos with very inexpensive gear, if the composition, subject and lighting are all great.
Most people don't need anything more than a decent $200 or even $100 camera. The trouble is that if you want to go to the "next level" -- you need to spend two or three times that (or lots more), and you can then get into low-light territory, which (IMO) is where all the excitement is. A truly *usable* 6400 or 12800 ISO is unbelievably liberating, and that's now here for well-under $1000.