"Though He had commanded the clouds from above, and opened the doors of heaven, And had rained down manna upon them to eat, and had given them of the corn of heaven."
Psalm 78:23,24
Something I have really come to appreciate is the capabilities of professional DSLR and Mirrorless cameras to take incredible quality videos. It's hard to imagine when digital cameras first came on the scene that they would come so far, but here we are. Current norms are now with 4K recording at 60 Hz, or frames per second.
Put that another way, that's 60 images every second at 8.3 megapixels. If and when we get to the point of 8K resolution being more dominant, we could see maybe 30 or 60Hz with that as well, this time with a resolution of 33 megapixels, give or take.
The numbers are quite mind boggling, but just come to show that digital cameras are far more rounded and versatile than ever. Perhaps AI is not the only threat to "traditional photography" (Funny even considering digital cameras as "traditional photography") Perhaps the industry will get to the point where photography is irrelevant.
Rather than snap pictures, just point the recording camera at your subject, wait for something notable to happen, then go back and find what you want from the still images. Seems remarkable, yet rather lazy at the same time, but I digress...
What I wanted to touch on today is that still photos still have a place. A tremendous place. With a trusty tripod, and a device called an intervalometer, which takes timed exposures, (and is included in many cameras already) there's a kind of video that even the big boys of 4K and 8K may get stumped on. That's Time-Lapse Photography.
As I've mentioned in previous articles here on the site, photography is to tell a story, and what a way to tell a story. With timed intervals, taking individual frames multiple times over the course of an hour or more, and with patience, the photographer (that could be you) can take videos of the Milky Way Galaxy flowing through the sky, or a beautiful flower opening it's petals, or a vibrant scenic landscape coming alive with rolling clouds and bustling movement.
To illustrate, I included a very brief demo below next to a still image of the same location, Oak Creek Canyon in Arizona. Simply press the play button on the embedded video.