Pixiq

When digital cameras first arrived the manufacturers blew away customers by creating ever-faster and ever-more-megapixeled bodies. For a few years the biggest excitement was over the sensors in the cameras. 

With digital photography maturing it's the ability of a camera that's wooing customers. High ISO and super-fast shutter speeds are doing more to attract photographers than the advancing megapixel counts did. 

Most recently (and most excitingly) digital SLR bodies turned into video cameras as the manufacturers accidentally stepped into what turned out to be a big pile of money. The video features in SLR cameras are sort of a side-effect of their sensor's designs. The CMOS chips that make up most SLR bodies now are largely derived from technology used in the video industry. The only issue is that the mirror in an SLR camera gets in the way of the sensor.

That's why compact digital cameras were first-on-the-scene to have video recording—the small bodies don't use a mirror for focusing so there's nothing to get in the way. All the camera companies had to do was figure out how to leave the mirror up and suddenly digital video was born. 

But a funny thing happened on the way to the digital video SLR—the size of most sensors actually make them better at recording cinema-quality video than most digital video cameras. That's because the 35mm sensor is the same size as movie film (that's why it was invented, after all) and so lenses designed for 35mm film cameras can produce absolutely stunning looking video.

I've used dSLR video quite a bit recently (even selling the Sony NXCam we used for a while at MacCreate to make our tutorial videos. 

Recently I've started to play with the combination of SLR video and macro lenses to look at the world-of-the-small. Here are a few examples of videos I've shot recently with the Nikon D3s, 105mm Micro Nikkor and HD video. 

I love the textures and quality of the images, there's something surreal about being so close to something. (And incidentally, the spot on the cat's eye is a cataract—she's a rescue cat and had an eye infection as a kitten before we found her that scarred her eye.)

This is an easy technique to try—simply get a macro lens and switch into HD mode. Since there's no autofocus you'll need to do it by hand (you can see me playing with it in the videos) but that gives it a cinematic feel too, when done right.