Moving Still Media

With the world headed toward cross-platform advertising (i.e., digital + print + broadcast + digital + digital), any investment in marketing artwork will soon require both still images and motion pieces from the same production. Clients will be doing fewer and fewer still-only photo shoots, or just 30 second spots.  Now they will need a range of creative material for the increasing range of marketing channels.

Increasingly these distribution channels for the artwork will be digital. And digital channels crave both still and moving images, often together, but certainly each in various contexts.

The most valuable resource on a shoot is time.  There’s never enough of it. And now doing two things (stills and motion) in the production, time just got even more scarce.

What does ISO have to do with all this?
The most time consuming thing in a production is lighting setup, and to say something is “the most time consuming thing” is to say it’s the most expensive thing. This is particularly true when moving to various locations or changing the lighting for different takes.  With budget’s getting cut, pre-lighting days are becoming more scarce – renting the location and paying a team for an extra day can (deceptively) seem like a waste to a cost accountant sitting in an office not experienced with a real-world production.  Just hustle the morning of the shoot or start earlier and save a few bucks.

The idea of doing two lighting setups (one for stills and one for motion) is going to be out of the question.  In addition to the costs and wasted time, you have even more lights to get in the shot or cast shadows for the motion camera.

PHOTOGRAPHERS: whether you are shooting only stills, or shooting the stills and the motion footage, you will not be able to do two lighting setups.  And motion filming requires constant lighting, so you will not be able to use strobes.  You will have to rely on the continual lighting setup for your still shots.

Continual lighting setups are not nearly as bright as strobes, and you have less control, and you have less time, and the client will be no less forgiving if you do not deliver great shots that compare with the strobe-lit shots in your portfolio. You do the math.

Cameras capable of low-noise at high ISO settings will be golden in these increasingly common scenarios.  High ISO capability will be THE key feature for photography in a motion world.  And the digital distribution norm we’re rapidly migrating to is a motion world.