How do I choose a camera?

Dangerous ground...especially if you don't know enough to know what you should be looking for. This blog posting is for those who want to stretch their knowledge and move beyond simple P&S (point and shoot) folks who just use their cameras to take family photos or video or LAMIGABEC! (Look at me - I've got …

Whither to aim…

1. Point and shoot cameras. Flip type cameras with no zoom or a very short distance zoom (or worse yet, optical zoom) and no microphone input. 2. Consumer level camcorders with one smallish chip, a decent zoom and no microphone input. 3. Prosumer/low end professional level camcorders with three chips and either XLR or mini-jack mike inputs. 4. DSLRs.

...high?  Low?  In between?

Like I used to tell my students, you gotta know your target audience before you even think about creating a visual story.  Well, the same thing applies to writing a book.  In this case, The Basics of Videojournalism.

Our original demographic was high schools...then we realized there was a wider potential audience, so we have adapted to that.  And we've also finally settled on some of the finer points about our audience, including what level of gear they need.

Roughly we've broken gear into four basic groups.

 

Pondering predictions…

...in this case, one I made more than a decade ago. The Internet was young and fanciful thoughts about what might happen to news were being bandied about when I came up with my wild concept. Imagine a news organization that only employed a few anchors and reporters, but a ton of writers and producers. …

Incompatible…

The saga continues... My senior with a new Sony hard drive camcorder reported back (as mentioned in the update below) that he could not import and edit with his new camera on his older computer with Windows Vista. After trying to open and convert with QuickTime Pro (four year old version) we opened up iMovie9 …

The new decade approaches…

...and it's time to look at cameras. Again. Sometimes looking for the right equipment is like trying to ride an avalanche. There is so much to look at and technology is changing so rapidly, it's hard to stay on top. Due to my ever shrinking budget, I bought two Aiptek (ISDV 2.4) cameras to fill …