Impulse

Last time, I described a few tech­ni­cal dif­fer­ences that make video more dif­fi­cult than stills. Video has a curi­ous advan­tage over still pho­tog­ra­phy, though: Because there’s less you can con­trol in video and because the medium is inher­ently lower qual­ity, video­g­ra­phers tend to be less tech­ni­cally fanat­i­cal than still pho­tog­ra­phers. Videographers under­stand “close enough”, thus free­ing their mind for more cre­ative things.

Still pho­tog­ra­phers, espe­cially fine art pho­tog­ra­phers, have com­plete con­trol of their image from begin­ning to end. They shoot it, process it, and cre­ate the final print them­selves. The image doesn’t leave their hands until it is framed and ready to hang. Still pho­tog­ra­phers also have the lux­ury of much higher res­o­lu­tion, dynamic range, and time as they only work on a sin­gle image (see last post). All of this leads many pho­tog­ra­phers to be amaz­ing con­trol freaks.
I think Ansel Adam’s Zone sys­tem was the begin­ning of the Fanatical Photographers. These pho­tog­ra­phers work like metic­u­lous sci­en­tists, using cod­i­fied pro­ce­dures to cal­i­brate each piece of equip­ment their images pass through. At each step of their process, they mea­sure the sub­tleties of their images using den­sit­o­me­ters and col­orime­ters to extract every nuance of shade and color they pos­si­bly can. The truly fanat­i­cal spend as much time and money on their process as on mak­ing pho­tos. When they look at a suc­cess­ful final image, they know that it is math­e­mat­i­cally impos­si­ble to bring out any more detail, or to more accu­rately repro­duce their vision. It’s all about end-to-end con­trol.
This level of con­trol is impos­si­ble in the world of video. Being a broad­cast medium, the final image will appear on all man­ner of devices — from an iPod to a 9″ CRT to a finely-tuned RunCo pro­jec­tor. Without con­trol of the device, video­g­ra­phers have very lit­tle con­trol over their final image. (Unlike still pho­tog­ra­phers who can choose the exact sheet of paper they’ll print on). Further, the medium itself is inher­ently low qual­ity thanks to the NTSC video stan­dard (which is actu­ally a hack from the 40s to add color to black and white TV), so even if they could con­trol the out­put device, there’s lit­tle could do with that con­trol.
Videographers, there­fore, don’t attempt to cre­ate images with math­e­mat­i­cal pre­ci­sion. Instead, they seek to cre­ate images that look great no mat­ter what device shows the final image. Colors and tones must look good rel­a­tive to each other, rather than meet­ing any absolute mea­sure­ment like a step wedge. As a result, video­g­ra­phers tend to rely on their eyes more, ask­ing “does it look right?” instead of “is the color accu­rate?” They don’t fall into the trap I see many still pho­tog­ra­phers fall into — so obsessed with details that they for­get to look at the image as a whole. Videographers can stay focused on the aes­thetic instead of the tech­ni­cal. I think this is very healthy — it’s the image that moves peo­ple, not the fact that you man­aged 7 zones of latitude.

Related posts:

1. Video vs still pho­tog­ra­phy, pt 1
2. Video vs still pho­tog­ra­phy, pt 3
3. Video vs still pho­tog­ra­phy, pt 4
4. Published again! My com­mer­cial video online
5. Yes we can Obama video