I’ve been saving some money for that last little while, fully expecting to make two purchases in the not too distant future. One of the first items will be a full frame camera body. I was forced to make a purchase of the 40D last year simply because I didn’t trust my current camera enough to shoot a friend’s wedding, but truthfully really wanted to get a full-frame instead. Canon’s only affordable (at least to me) full frame is the Canon EOS 5D, but unfortunately it’s about 3 years old now and doesn’t have a lot of the new bells and whistles in it. Canon has been basically silent on the replacement for it for the last year or so, and I’m wondering if they no longer wish to provide a low-priced full frame going forward. Given that the 5D is around $2000 and that the next full frame is around $4000 or so I believe, I’m starting to wonder if Canon is going to only offer full frames in it’s top-tier line-up. Either way, yours truly is going to have a full frame before the end of the year, even if I have to sell some of my current gear to buy one of the professional bodies in the $4k – $5k range.
The second purchase I will make (and in terms of timing might actually be the first purchase) will be a HD video camera. My background is actually in video, and I did my master’s degree at UBC in video compression. Had I had the money back in the day, I probably would have purchased a video camera instead of my first digital camera, since that was where my interest was at the time. Given that I have pretty decent handle on photography now, I thought I would start exploring video in more depth.
If I go that route, rest assured that duanestorey.com will have full 720p videos available for everything I do. I’m no longer interested in having my videos bastardized by youtube. I’ll probably whip some type of flash player together for videos that will be stored on Amazon S3. I think Boris had a link at some point to something along those lines, so I’ll probably Duane-ify it a bit.
While I obviously like photography, I think in some cases you lose a lot of what makes an event or situation unique given the constraints of the medium. That’s why I think video would be a good compliment to my already existing photography hobby.
Not sure of the timeline on the camera, but I’ll probably start scoping stuff out next month.
Duane,
I would love to improve my video skills to complement my photography. Keep us posted on the costs and your experiences. Video is the now (both live and recorded).