Mike Bonnicksen used our new video gear testing the equipment and trying his hand at video editing and came up with a really great first project documenting Chris Ohta, the manager and a “ski tunah” at Tune-A-Sport working on skis.

Mike has some video experience, shooting video for a television news project the Wenatchee World had in the mid to late 1980s. In those days shooting video meant lugging around a large camera, a video deck and tripod. And if you wanted to shoot stills, you had to carry that gear too.

I had dug in my heels and refused to shoot both stills and video because of the extra load and because of the huge potential of missing a still photo moment while shooting video. So the paper hired Mike to shoot exclusively video until the television project was canceled after a few years.

What is different now? Why is the photo staff able to shoot both? “The gear has changed a lot,” says Mike. “The gear is a lot smaller, seems to be a lot better, and the ability to get frame grabs is revolutionary. I predict that in five years, most photos in the paper will be grabbed off of video rather than taken with still cameras.”

Check out his first “new” project.