4K 'Motion Portrait' Shot On Canon's C500 -- or -- How Good She Looks In Motion

Motion portraits, or moving portraits -- a stylized video of a person usually done in a studio with crafted lighting and direction from the filmmaker/photographer -- may become a big thing, or at least a thing.

I came across this write up about Clive Booth's motion portrait of Henry Holland at CanonWatch and checked it out because it was shot on Canon's C500.

I'm impressed by the three dimensional look of the C500, skin tones and of course, being shot in 4k, the sharpness and resolution. It's a great camera. (Watch at 720p at least).



So, I click the YouTube logo and end up at Showstudio's page and (mostly because it was the featured autoplay video) watched fashion photog Nick Knight's thoughts on the evolution of photography, which made a lot of sense.



Knight did this shot of Lady Gaga for the cover of Vanity Fair.

Nice to be sure, but this making-of video, for a few seconds here and there, is tremendously dynamic. Because it's not a music video and only focuses on her, who she is, how she chooses to present herself, there's a distilled focus that makes it much more compelling than most still portraits I've seen.



Knight usually shoots on medium format, which captures about 1 frame a second. A 35mm DSLR can get about 10-12 shots per second. A camera like the C500 (or a RED, Alexa, Sony F, etc.) captures 24-240 fps and it's hard to argue that's a whole different world.

Knight's a great shooter but his stills of Lady Gaga just don't hold up when compared to video. I agree with his opinion (above) -- still photographs no longer define what photography is about. They may be the classic way to display someone's visage, like painting was before the technology developed, but motion capture might become the next standard way of showing a portrait, especially considering how print media has stepped aside and the internet, being accessible almost anywhere/anytime, makes such an evolution just about inevitable.