Faster and faster
Last week I travelled to St Andrews for the pre-launch of the Nikon D3s, a camera that can see what the eye cannot, by virtue of its extraordinary sensitivity to even the most low lit environments, boasting 'standard' ISO settings up to 12,800, and a boost mode up to 102,400 - something that would have been unfathomable to film photographers 20 years ago.
It's also welcome to see that Canon and Nikon are no longer competing like-for-like on resolution, and that professional photographers have real choice - which is a genuine surprise this late into digital's maturity, when technological innovation is rare. That's evident in their respective approaches to video capture; the biggest thing to have happened to digital SLRs in the past year.
Canon seemed to have taken the lead on Nikon with the 5D Mk II, particularly when it showed what Vincent Laforet had done with it for his first movie, Reverie, which brought Hollywood-style production to the fingertips of a stills shooter for the first time. But in St Andrews, Nikon showed something even more impressive to my mind. Sports Illustrated photographer Bill Frakes presented an assignment he shot for Nikon; a tour around Australia taking in action shots, portraits and landscapes, shot both in the high, harsh light of day, and at twilight.
But what really caught my attention was the seamless interplay of stills and motion, which combined to tell a story using photographs to arrest significant moments and compositions. We're still in the early days of still/video convergence, and newspapers and magazines in Europe have mostly still not quite grasped how they'll be used together for online multimedia, but this is the closest I've seen to how imagine reportage working in the future.
In the US, despite the deep trouble print titles have found themselves in, newspapers and magazines have put resources behind multimedia and they're building large online audiences with them. With one such project, Frakes revealed, his photos were seen in print by eight million people, while his multimedia show from the same event was watched by 50 million visitors to Sports Illustrated's website. What's more, the multimedia resulted in more print sales, proving that online and print can complement each other to mutual benefit.
Simon Bainbridge, Editor.
