Videos are great for recording events and action. Every week most of us watch hours of moving images in some form or other.

So why do we still take still photographs?

When we see a moving image we watch it very much as we do real events happening around us. We look to see what it’s going to do. We enjoy trying to anticipate its next action. Because we’re concentrating on the action we take in relatively little of the detail of the image and concentrate largely on the aspects of it that are changing.

Because we are pre-occupied with action, we often miss detail. That is why it is quite common to see something in a still photograph that we did not notice when we were taking the picture. 

The still photograph doesn’t change, so we have time to study it in detail. A good still photograph therefore has the potential to convey so much more in terms of human emotion. We can see sadness, pathos, despair and tragedy as well as anger, joy, love and beauty. It has the potential to capture human strength alongside human weakness. A really great still photograph, much like a painting, has the ability of showing us something different each time we look at it.

Still photographs get hung on walls or stood on sideboards as a constant reminder of a point in time. Videos tend to be less enduring being archived into constantly growing storage capacity. 

Try to look good for the video camera, but make doubly sure that you look your best in those enduring stills.

email bob@lookgoodoncamera.com to find out more

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