I've got the fisheye v1 & it's good fun. The V2 added a fisheye viewfinder to take away some of the guess work.
Nice little cameras. Fleabay always has cheap lomo stuff.

I have my eye on a Nikon D700 now...£2k worth of full-frame goodness!

Nikon D3S: hands-on first look

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/352450/niko ... first-look

FYI

£3.5k and doesn't do 1080p HD vid?

Ouch.

I'm still not convinced I'd want my DSLR to do video. But yeah. Seems pricey!

Check out that ISO range though.
We've just been discussing it here in work and none of the three of us can up with the market that this is aimed at.

Mark

Good. I don't like the way video's being shoe horned into cameras these days.
A decent photographer does not always a decent videographer make.
It's doing nobody any favours, and the two disciplines aren't interchangeable.
Right tools for the job and all that.

Anyway, good to see Nikon concentrating on noise performance rather than adding a bazzilion more pixels, although I wish they'd have reviewed the shots on a monitor rather than (apparently) the body display.

The display on the back of the camera is very good indeed.
This is essentially the camera I have only with stupidly high ISO. Everything else it has, mine has the same.
The screen is really very accurate, though to be fair, you do spot things on a monitor that you can miss using the camera display, that's for sure.

Mark

There is a trend developing against the high pixel counts, which is good. The knock-on is the noise handling can be improved.

I was sceptical about video on a DSLR, but I can now sort of see why - think of the lenses you get access to with an SLR, compared to what you can get with an equivalent price of HD camcorder... I don't know the current rates, but a pro camcorder and lens setup is going to orders of magnitude more expensive than a DSLR and lenses - although you could argue the Canon XL series camcorders come close.

I'm keen to try out the HD video, but that lust is having to wait until I can afford the 5D MkII body. I definitely have a use for video in that body style, and it seems a lot of pro photographers are beginning to see the benefits too.

Heather, having access to good lenses is all well and good, but what do you do about the audio?
You're not going to get pro audio inputs on a digital stills camera any time soon, so really, what's the point in being able to capture high definition video if the sound's so appalling that it renders the footage unusable?

Mark

Audio is the problem - but arguably it's the same for most camcorders.

There are plenty of semi-pro solutions out there, often at surprisingly reasonable cost, which plug into the DLSR's mic socket. Scott Bourne's been blogging about just that over at Photofocus.

http://photofocus.com/2009/10/12/quick- ... lr-camera/

From my perspective, the sort of stuff I want to video will often have audio added during editing.

I'll try and nail down my dislike of pro-cameras trying to cover video.
Why is it included? To allow you to take video footage.
What are you filming? This is a pro-camera, so I'm going to guess that it's probably not the family on the beach, or that stag night where Keith was downing the flaming Sambuca's and now you're going to embarrass him on Facebook.
So who is asking you to take video? Presumably a client. A client who's thinking 'I like your photos, but I need video as well, and I'm too cheap to go and get a lighting camera man with his own kit to do it.'

It's stretching the remit of what you're expected to do as a photographer, and it's eroding the remit of people who do video professionally. If you're seriously into taking stills, I'm going to guess there's a reason you haven't wanted to move into playing with video instead. Working with a moving image is another ball game entirely, at a professional level. The thought processes and post production is sea apart.
I'm sure there is a niche market for this sort of camera, I'm just not very sure what it is. It does feel a lot like it's being shoehorned in as a way of differentiating your camera from everyone else's, and now everyone else has to stick it in to be considered 'fully featured'.
At what point do we start getting mobile phones and 3G connectivity being added, because they'd be useful too. Imagine, being able to answer a call from your client without taking your face from the finder!

I disagree, Alex.

There's a lot of noise from the blogs I follow where pro stills shooters have been asked to do video. It won't be their main income stream, obviously, but don't you agree a good stills photographer may well have a good eye for video as well?

Mind you, there's always going to be the need, and space, for proper video cameras and operators.

I don't actually like the idea of video being shoehorned into a stills camera, but it's happening. If it means there's one less bit of kit I need to lug about, that's good. I'm pretty sure that if I wanted to make video my main hobby, I'd be after a good camcorder setup (actually, Best Beloved got very into it a few years ago, and we did get some very good pro-am gear, so I've played at the edges of video production). I prefer to shoot stills, but there are times when I'd also like to be able to capture moving images around the same subject. An HD-enabled DSLR would be ideal.

There's a US TV company now using Canon DSLRs to make short video segments. I can't locate the link right now, soz. All I see is what I originally regarded as a step too far is actually being embraced by the digital photography world, and it's taking off very quickly.

It's happening all over, and a lot of photog courses also cover some video work as well.
There's more to dealing with a moving image than purely composition though, Heather. Of course it depends on what the job you've been asked to do is, as to what tool you should be using. As Mark pointed out, do these cameras generate time code that I sync audio to? Assuming I'm focussing manually, I'm soon going to want a more comfortable way of holding the camera, so I'm going to be thinking about a shoulder rest. If I'm not doing this as a one man band (although I suspect if you're client is asking for video from a photographer, you are) then can I set up a monitor feed for the client?



I've seen stories of the first feature shot on the 3DMkII. It's early days, but I don't think the likes of Arri or Panavision are going to be worried just yet. There's also a question of how you budget and account for your work as a videographer, and how much are you going to be expected to do. I know a photog who won't do weddings any more because of the time it took up - coping with a post-production of a video you've shot, when presumably your client isn't willing to pay the going rate, is doing yourself a disservice.

So your current camera only has moderately high ISO?!?!?!?!?!?!