Is 4K Video the Future of Portrait Photography?

My head and hard disk are both spinning after a recent demo I did about shooting a portrait session in 4K Video. That’s right—video.

My head is spinning as I think about how having the ability to grab a usable still frame out of a 4K video is going to change the way we shoot portraits, weddings, almost everything. An 8-megapixel image is more than enough with most images nowadays just being used on the Internet.

My hard disk is spinning because of the large file sizes that 4K video produces. Hard drives are getting larger and cheaper (a 6TB drive costs $279) so I think this is not as much of a problem as people make it out to be.

Let’s break all the rules and shoot the video vertically! I was shooting a video of the model in this photo horizontally because that’s how I was taught to shoot video. I realized that I wasn’t shooting to make a video; I was shooting to pull a still image to use for a traditional portrait, which I would usually shoot vertically.

I grabbed the still image in Lightroom 5 and turned it 90 degrees and had a beautiful portrait that is 8×12-inches at 240dpi after I cropped it.