Panasonic GH5 introduced

Today Panasonic introduced the Lumix DMC-GH5. An interesting feature of this new camera is the ability to shoot photos as a short burst of 6K video at 60 frames per second. Afterwards, you can select the best frame to use as the final photo. Great for fast action when you know exactly when the action will take place, like in the examples Panasonic showed of children throwing water at each other, or an object falling in a glass of water. But when I think about my own experience in the field of wildlife photography, it becomes clear to me that ‘photos from video’ still have a long way to go before they can really take over from a fast shooting photo camera. Wild animals aren’t so predictable that you can shoot action with a one second video burst. The bursts would have to be quite a bit longer to really become and alternative. The other problem is that the most difficult part of shooting this is to predict where and when the action will take place. So the most important part remains how fast the photographer can react and start shooting, regardless if it’s shooting photos or video bursts.

Maybe that’s a good thing. If photograhy really became just a matter of shooting an endless video and then grabbing the best frames, wouldn’t that spoil part of the photography experience? To me it definitely would!