A Multimedia Artist’s Dream

If you’re a photographer slash videographer slash musician slash one-man multimedia band like me, today is a great time to be alive.

As Thanksgiving comes to a close here in Nashville, TN, I am thankful for one of the biggest game changers ever to hit the image capture industry — the Canon EOS 5D Mark II.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Canon EOS 5D Mark II

Why? Convergence. This baby can make video look better than most video cameras on the market, and it’s a professional photography camera. With a limited budget, telling a story on a professional level in more than one way used to be extremely difficult. You either had to commit to photography or videography. They each had their own fields, expertise, and equipment. Today, that’s all changing.

I have been waiting for this to come for a long time. Between RED bringing modularity and ground breaking digital cinema technology to the masses and Nikon and Canon bringing video to the photography world, all we need now is for someone like Digidesign or Shure to step in and build an audio capture add-on. This is only the beginning in a long line of devices that will converge into one master capture device, making guys like me able to work faster, better and cheaper. Not to mention watch our multimedia art, visual story telling, image directing, whatever-we-will-call-it niche grow.

One telling article I ran across earlier this year on PopPhoto.com, “The Photographer As Director,” called us visual chameleons and imagemakers. Is anyone else actually glad we are finally getting some attention here?

Expressing and communicating through any and all media through less and less devices is happening.

Once the tools level the entry barriers, it will increasingly become more and more about what you have to say and how you say it. Stop dreaming and start creating.

Today, we can.

2 Comments A Multimedia Artist’s Dream

  1. Casey Kendall

    I am really into digital photography and enhancement/manipulation and I was wondering how much this camera cost you? I am currently using a Sony DSC-H7 that the army has issued me (I am shortly coming home from Afghanistan), but I’d like to get a good, but not expensive digicam, that has the right settings, both automatics and manual, after I come home. I am soon to be getting back into my passion of skydiving and am also looking for a helmet mountable camera and this one you were citing looks like it might work.

    Thanks for your input!

    casey

  2. Jeff Dolan

    @Casey – First, I want to give you total respect for your service to our country. Thank you.

    I’ve been calling B&H to find out when their next shipment comes in, and I have yet to get my hands on one, but I have been following its release along with everyone else in the industry. If you are looking for professional video and photography capture, this is it, at least for now, at a price point around $3,500 with the lens. The manual controls are not totally manual, but very workable for most needs. Its Nikon counterpart that beat it to market is the D90 that does 720p HD instead of 1080p HD video and rings in at $1,500.

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