See you around bro…
mel

For photographers who see a progression in their careers into motion picture, a tool like the 5D Mark II can only help and not hurt. I think it can be a great training ground for a budding cinematographer prior to shooting film. With their principles being the same, motion picture cinematography and photography are essentially one and the same craft, more so than videography and photography. What you see through the viewfinder of a D-SLR is what you see through that of a motion picture film/video camera.

In videography, everything in the frame goes so deep I’ve noticed many videographers don’t have a sense of how to populate a frame; because of the limitations of video, they don’t realize that objects, being blurred in the background, can lend a lot to the overall composition of a shot. On a film shoot, it’s always about “Move that prop in the background an inch to the right of frame” so that its shape “flows” in the shot, while on a video shoot, things are more often than not removed from the shot because they are simply too distracting.

On a separate note, I suspect we’ll see a new generation of cinematographers whose roots are only in Super 35mm-based digital cameras (RED ONE, ARRI D-21, Viper, etc), who have never exposed a roll of 16mm or 35mm film.