Still shooters finding their way to documentary work through DSLRs
Posted by DocumentaryTech on March 4, 2010 · Leave a Comment
Back in the early 1980s, when 2-time Pulitzer-winning news photographer Stanley Forman left the Boston Herald to become a videographer for Boston’s WCVB Channel 5, many of his journalistic peers were mystified. TV video was, to most a step down; the sanctity of the still image was unquestioned, and TV footage tended to be cheap-looking and utilitarian. Documentary still photographers such as Eugene Richards or Sebastiao Salgado told complex, meaningful stories in a succession of stills.
Even decades later, photojournalists resisted the videocam, both in terms of using videocams for framegrabbing, as advocated by David Leeson (another Pulitzer winner from the Dallas Morning News) or in their employers’ urging to shoot video on assignment – it was too much like their supposed second-rate TV peers.
But it seems that the DSLR is changing that. It provides still shooters a tool that feels familiar in their hands, and produces footage as crisp and clean as the stills they shoot. The fuzzy TV footage of their memory is gone.
So it’s interesting to look at shooters such as Rii Schroer at the UK’s Daily/Sunday Telegraph and The Times, who is posting on her move into documentary-style work. In a post at DSLR News Shooter, she says,
(I) took my first steps into DSLR-video shooting when the Canon 5DmkII came out. I started with a “shut up and shoot” approach and an interest in short pieces I felt were better captured with video than pictures only, such as 16 Teeth, capturing Cumbria’s last traditional rakemakers.
16 TEETH – Cumbria’s last traditional rakemakers from Rii Schroer on Vimeo.
Simple, visually appealing and skillfully shot, the piece shows the worth of these tools.
In short-film making every sequence needs as much planning as possible, and the intensity of the visual side produces the discipline of looking at the shoot in-depth from as many different views as possible. It is about getting to grips with how to achieve certain shots technically and looking into what equipment can be useful in creating those shots.