A Multimedia Artist’s Dream

Cannon EOS 5D Mark II.

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.

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.