I’ve recent­ly upgrad­ed my com­put­er to a new­er machine capa­ble of pro­cess­ing the beau­ti­ful high-def­i­n­i­tion video files that my 5DmkII can pro­duce. It’s a lot of fun to learn about the whole new world of video cap­ture and edit­ing, and I’m just start­ing to get a bit of a han­dle on things.

One thing I’ve been doing recent­ly as a first step into work­ing with video is to make a pho­to­graph and a video of the same sub­ject. These are basi­cal­ly still pho­tographs, with motion. What I like about mak­ing shots like these is that some­times, the motion in a scene is an impor­tant part of the “essence” of the scene, and now I have a way to try to cap­ture that too.

In this exam­ple (com­pare the video in this post with the still pho­to­graph in yes­ter­days post), I used a long-ish expo­sure for the still image (1/2 a sec­ond) to hint at the move­ment of the water, but I also cap­tured this short video clip. I tried (some­what suc­cess­ful­ly) adding a vignette effect to match the pro­cess­ing of the pho­to­graph. What do you think? Is there some­thing addi­tion­al in the video that’s miss­ing in the still pho­to? or does the video just add com­plex­i­ty to the image with­out adding to the “essence”? In any case, it’s fun to exper­i­ment with, and that’s the whole point. I hope you enjoy it.