Am I a photographer or videographer?

A few people asked me recently if I'm going to learn video editing and how to shoot video. The short answer is absolutely not. Not professionally anyway.

I am a still photographer. I respect film and video far too much to try to pass myself off for a professional videographer. I find it intriguing that every time the still photographic industry goes through an evolution many people believe they too must evolve to be part of the industry in order to stay marketable and valuable. I do not believe this is always true.

I remember about 10 years ago when the web was really coming on. Internet speeds were starting to get to the point where it wasn't annoying work online; speeds and content were evolving rapidly. I know a lot of photographers; myself included; started to learn HTML. We were told and thought that if you wanted to be a photographer in the new millennium you were going to have to know how to build your own website and maintain it. Gratefully this is not the case.

Many DSLR's are now offering video capabilities. I am noticing that some professional still photographers are starting to look at video in much the same way as some of us viewed the web.

I am a still photographer. I love taking images. Whether capturing them with a digital camera or exposing film. I have decided that focusing on managing my film and digital archive is my next evolution in my creative and professional career.

Snow Leopard or Slow Leapard*

Apple's latest operating system Snow Leopard totes 64-bit capability, advanced support for people with disabilities (braille software ready to go out of the box/upgrade) an increased utilization of the faster graphic processors when developing.

All this sounds good in theory. I am one of those people who I usually do not upgrade to a new software and/or hardware until it's had an opportunity to be tested or ran for a bit to have all of the bugs worked out. Sometimes I wait up to a year, however that is usually with Windows products. With Mac operating systems however generally 3 to 6 months is what I feel comfortable with.

The glitches I've heard about with the Snow Leopards upgrade so far is the fact that it runs very very slow when you're trying to use the mail program and a few other applications. I'm sure updates and patches will be available for these slow run times and matter of weeks if not days. I look forward to upgrading to Snow Leopard within a couple months.

* Term coined by pb