IAC DISCUSSION FORUMS

Amateur Photographer Magazine recently set up a new website for movie makers and I see from this weeks AP that they have launched a new film making competition. It's in three rounds each with a different theme, and there are prizes worth £10,000. The web-site is http://www.thevideomode.com/afoy if anyone is interested.

Has anyone looked at this competition? I think it is significant that it has been launched by a photographic journal as so many people now seem to be filming with digital cameras. I was in Glasgow yesterday and saw three groups of what appeared to be students filming in the city centre. They were all using SLR cameras and were definitely shooting movies because they were using microphones.

The daughter of a very good friend of mine gave up her post with an advertising agency to take up documentary film making. She attended a short course and has now made two documentaries, both very good and both shot on the Canon DSLR, against my advice! However I can't fault the pictures and her ability to minimise the DoF certainly helps the general look. I still maintain though that the purpose made and designed video cameras still make the most sense, especially for documentaries.

As an experiment I recently shot some video using a Nikon D7100 with sound recorded via the Nikon supplementary microphone and I have to say that I was very pleased with the results. The picture quality (full HD) was excellent and the sound was also pretty good so I can understand why filming on digital cameras is popular. The D7100 has the advantage of having two SD card slots so one can be decicated to recording any movie material and the other to stills.