Video: Just Push The Red Button

Today’s Post by Mark Toal

Last week as I parked at a restaurant for lunch I noticed a man with three Parrots on the back of his truck and music blaring from his radio. How could I not go over and see what this was all about? He turned out to be a very talkative guy who does children’s events with the birds.

I was carrying the new Panasonic Lumix FZ2500, a super zoom camera that shoots great video. I was taking photos of the birds for about ten minutes when it dawned on me that this was a video moment. The birds were so animated that the stills didn’t capture the joy of watching them. I could have gone into the manual video setting to get the proper shutter speed, but I needed to shoot quickly so I just pressed the red video button on the top of the camera. The video may not be technically perfect, but it captured the moment perfectly.

At home I uploaded the video to Lightroom, edited it slightly for length and saved the new file to be uploaded to Vimeo. It all took about five minutes.

Don’t be afraid of video. It’s easy to shoot stills and video at the same time. I love the still images of the birds, but the video makes me smile every time I watch it.