Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Using The D-Movie Mode Of The Nikon D90 For Photojournalistic Purposes At The COBP Protest Against Police Brutality In Montreal

I have not made a lot of use of the D-Movie Mode of my Nikon D90 since I bought it last November, but I did use it fairly extensively this past weekend to take about 15-20 HD videos of the 13th International Protest Against Police Brutality Protest on Sunday March 15, 2009, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. This is my first use of the Nikon D90's 720p HD video D-Movie mode for what could be described as photojournalism and/or "news gathering" documentary video purposes. Previous uses of D-Movie Mode were primarily for some family videos or videos of musical performances ranging from classical music concerts, through heavy metal rock concerts, to a Death Metal festival.

I have uploaded 15 of the better video clips of the weekend anti-police brutality protest organized by the Collective Opposed to Police Brutality (COBP) to my YouTube channel, and I will embed two or three of the best one's in this blog post so that you can see how they look on YouTube. The "normal" YouTube mode has a distinctly "soft" look to it which does not do justice to the high quality 720p HD video that the Nikon D90 is capable of producing. The HQ mode is a *lot* better but of course the best quality is viewing the HD video directly from the memory card or hard-drive on a high quality computer monitor or HD TV screen.


Don't forget to click on HQ to view the video in YouTube's High Quality mode

At around 2:30pm, at the corner of rue St. Denis and Sherbrooke Street, some of the "provocateurs" in the crowd of protesters threw smoke grenades at the line of riot police blocking access to rue St. Denis below Sherbrooke Street. The first stun grenade or smoke bomb actually seen in this video goes off at the 21 second mark to the left of the line of riot police although one or two a heard to go off prior to this. At the 45 second mark a second smoke bomb is seen. At first I thought that this second smoke bomb was tear gas being used by the riot police to disperse the crowd, and one person exposed to the smoke affirms that it is tear gas when I ask him, however I don`t believe that it was actual tear gas and it may well have been another smoke bomb thrown by a protester rather than one used by the police. It is however possible that this second "smoke bomb" was a pepper-spray type smoke grenade used by the police as an alternative to tear gas.

This video, and all other videos of 13th International Protest Against Police Brutality Protest in Montreal, were shot in the 720p HD video of D-Movie Mode using my Nikon D90 DSLR with an 18-200mm Nikkor VR lens attached to it. I also took some very good still images with the Nikon D90 and my Nikon D300 which I may post here a bit later.



A "Punk" Sporting A Bright Red Mohawk Confronts Riot Police During COBP Protest



A street band plays in the middle of rue St. Denis during the Anti-Police Brutality Protest of The Collective Opposed to Police Brutality on Sunday March 15 2009

This video gives a good idea of the sound quality of the Nikon D90's monaural microphone which really is quite good. I was impressed with the decent sound quality of the videos I took of classical concerts. Still, those stun grenades going off in the first video were a LOT louder than the video conveys. They sounded like a small cannon being fired.

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