Frame grab

Back to the goldfinches - but this was more of an experiment with the camera and techniques than being about the photograph. I shot in video today (though HD rather than 4K). Of course the camera was in 14:9 format, which meant that the birds were quite a small part of the image. Of course I couldn’t post the video, so instead I used the frame grab feature of the video editor to get a still photo. As I was shooting video at 25fps, I set the shutter speed at 1/50, and the result looks satisfactory as video, but for a still this is really too long an exposure, so there is visible motion blur. And the still starts as a 1080 x 1920 image, even before cropping!

I might experiment tomorrow in a similar mode, but using 4K video, which at least will provide a higher resolution still to work from.

I used the GH4 for this work, as it is good at video, though unfortunately the tethered capture software is not free (unlike the Olympus) and also it only works when taking stills, not video (also unlike the Olympus), so I operated the camera using WiFi and an iPad.