My DSLR Beef

Going a little too far

Everyday i flip on facebook and someone has taken a picture of their new t2i and 18-55mm lens, of themselves through the mirror with the flash still on, and my personal favorite the good ole “im gonna write a list of all the crap I need so that people know I’m at least thinking about getting a career.” Generally, I count them off as idiots and move on with my life. Other times, I immediately begin to blame DSLR’s for the tomfoolery. As a cinematographer, you’ll be suprised to hear me say this, but I’ve got beef with DSLR’s. But not for the reasons I just listed.

Ever since the arrival of Canon’s line of digital SLRS, you (as an internet junky don’t deny it) can log onto Vimeo or Youtube and watch some jackaloon put up crisp HD quality videos of his or her baby son eating formula, a deer in the backyard eating grass, 3 kids laughing on top of a building, and extreme closeups of irrelevant items they have found around their house. Hell, I could walk to the fence in my frontyard with a 50mm f/1.8, and rack onto a chipmunk 7 inches away, and think I’m crafting an artistic message.  The obsession with the DSLR “look” and shallow depth of field has taken the video industry by storm, with the only alternate being insanely expensive 35mm film cameras or 4k resolution, high-frame rate beasts.

Ultimately this scares me. Anyone can throw down 900 bucks on a body, a few hundred on some lenses, and beat my ass with some crisps images. Everyone has the capability to think artistically, and even if you have zero experience with video, it comes natural to think of situations on the scope of a timeline. Even when you dream or retell a buddy a story, how often do you see life from the first hand point-of view? You see yourself, you cut to the object your looking at, a transition into where you went to next.

My beef: Everyone can be a shooter and editor right now by taking even just a week to understand the workings of the camera. Meaning, all of us have to find a way to make our work distinguishable over the mass, whether through themes in the content or the way in which a piece is edited. My beef is that DSLR’s basically gave me my job, but gave everyone else mine as well. I should probably get off wordpress right now and hit the CreMlabs.