Industry Trends Series with El Deane Naude

Pat Miller: 00:00

I'm Pat Miller, and this is The Professional Photographer Podcast. Welcome to The Professional Photographer Podcast. I'm your host, Pat Miller, and we are not on a normal set. We are live from Imaging USA 2025 in Dallas. You're joining us for the industry trends series, and we have one of the experts with us today. El-Deane Naude from Sony is gonna go deep on everything that's happening with technology, with workflows, with lenses, with AI. We could barely, like, get it all in. In fact, I think if we would have kept recording, we could have easily filled all of YouTube with what he has to share. So if you love gear and you love technology, this Industry Trends series interview is going to be for you. Now we're gonna hear all about Sony, but we do wanna thank them for their support here at Imaging USA. Their Sony cinema line cameras have been flawless, and everything's been controlled with Sony's Monitor & Control app. It's been great throughout the entirety of the session. Alright. It's time to get comfortable, and it's time to enjoy the industry trends of technology with LD. Great to see you, friend. Thanks for coming on the show. How are you today?

El-Deane Naude: 01:18

Fantastic. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here at Imaging.

Pat Miller: 01:20

I'm excited that you're here, and you've done a great job, you and your team, setting us up. The technology has been fantastic. So, big shout out to Sony. They've really taken care of us. So if someone doesn't know you, they need to tell us about your career and what you do with Sony.

El-Deane Naude: 01:34

So I've been with Sony for about twenty–actually, this is my twentieth year at Sony. I've just surpassed that. First two years as a producer, and then I switched into the imaging group, and I've been on the product management side for eighteen years now. So, from the beginning of Alpha, I was working on Handicam at the time but then as time progressed, worked over all different categories and then most recently took on things like phones, drones, cloud services, software focusing on our ZV series, and then we have two other product managers, one focusing on Alpha and lens and another one focusing on our cinema line of cameras which we're shooting on over here.

Pat Miller: 02:16

That's right.

El-Deane Naude: 02:16

So, yeah. So, just everything product development and industry-wise, you know, just keeping our ear to the ground and moving the business forward.

Pat Miller: 02:25

I love talking to experts who love what they do, and I hope someday I love something as much as you love this gear and technology to hear you talk with people. Is it just something that brings you joy every day you're working on it?

El-Deane Naude: 02:36

Absolutely. You know, my wife always gives me a hard time about how come you love work so much? I say, I absolutely love what I do. I love the products I work with. I love the company I work for. You know, it's just an absolute privilege to be at the forefront of technology on a daily basis and, you know, and to have our voice heard. You know, we we come to events like PPA events, like Imaging and and other industry events, and we go and speak to customers all the time. And to hear the issues that they faced with, to listen to their voice. And then to be able to take that back, to communicate that to our product planners and our engineers. And even the impossible or what seems impossible, you always get the reply of saying, "I think we can do that." And inevitably, they actually do it. So I'm always amazed at what our engineers and product planners in Japan do, but, you know, with our feedback and saying, hey, I'd really like this. Can you put this on a camera for me? And they're like, "Yeah. Let's see. We'll do it for you." And which is always fantastic.

Pat Miller: 03:37

This is about the deep dive for industry trends. Sony has their hand in everything. There's so much to talk about. We've broken it up into chunks. Let's start with hardware. What are the trends with hardware with Sony?

El-Deane Naude: 03:51

So with hardware, you know, obviously, mirrorless is, you know, we said this over a decade ago that mirrorless is the future, and we stuck a stake in the ground in 2010 or somewhere around there, coming out with our first APS-C mirrorless cameras, and then we launched the Alpha 7 series a couple years later and basically stuck a stake in the ground saying that DSLR is dead and that mirrorless is the future. And it's taken a long time, over a decade, for our competitors to get the message and to start catching up. And I think the wide adoption of mirrorless in the industry now is that next phase. It's showing the industry that, and not to say that Sony was right, but, you know, we were at the forefront of developing it. But professionals, you know, consumers, amateurs, everybody has moved to mirrorless cameras. They're smaller. They're lighter. They're faster. They're more, you know, robust. A lot of people think because they're smaller, they're not as robust. They're actually more robust. And they can just do more than what a DSLR, a mechanical-bound machine could do. You know, it's like the electric car of the future. This is where we are with mirrorless cameras. So that adoption, to me, has been, you know, pivotal. We've been working on it at Sony. We face the rhetoric of people. Who are you guys promoting this mirrorless? And then suddenly, we become number one market share. And the other companies, you know, perked up. But we feel like, you know, high tides are gonna raise all sails. Right? So everybody's gonna go up in the industry. And it's not only better for the manufacturers, but it's better for the photographers, for the creator to have a tool that's more advanced, that they're more willing to take with them because it's smaller and lighter, and that can do things that DSLRs couldn't do for us is just a proof that we were on the right path. Right? And so we're moving forward on that path as well. So the next forefront is gonna be lenses, and then, you know, we can talk about the types of mirrorless cameras because that has also been segmented quite a lot as well.

Pat Miller: 05:51

So tell us about that. We'll get to the lenses in a minute. I know you got a to say about lenses.

El-Deane Naude: 05:55

Sure. I do.

Pat Miller: 05:55

The different types of cameras. Tell us about that.

El-Deane Naude: 05:57

Alright. So, you know, looking at the different segments, obviously, we have APS-C, which, you know, a lot of mirrorless cameras started in APS-C, some, you know, micro four thirds or smaller. But, you know, a lot of those companies are still doing extremely well in the industry. But we progressed to full frame and, you know, what we consider a full frame high market, and we're seeing a very strong push towards full frame high cameras. Cameras in the upper price points, but that are made for professionals. And we are at PPA, and we're speaking to professionals. So cameras like the Alpha 1 series, which we now have the Alpha 1 Mark II, or the Alpha 9, which we now have the Alpha 9 Mark III that I have here. So cameras that incorporate higher readout speed sensors or in the Alpha 9 III's case, a global shutter, and that is going to be the next generation. So when we're saying mirrorless was the future, we're now saying global shutter is gonna be the future. Right? So the Alpha 1 really broke boundaries as becoming the number one premium segment camera in the market for very good reasons. Eight times the readout speed as a regular sensor. You know, it could do 50 megapixels at 30 frames a second, no compromises, 8K video, 4K up to 120. It was really that flagship model that didn't just do, you know, jack of all trades, but it was the best at everything and that it did. Nothing else could compare. And now we come out with the Alpha 9 as the kind of co-flagship. It's a 24-megapixel, it's not 50, but global shutter is really where it takes it to the next level. So the difference is you don't need a focal plane shutter where most cameras would have a flash sync speed of 1/160th or 1/200th. Better cameras, 1/250th. Premium segment cameras like the Alpha 1, 1/450th of a second. The Alpha 9 can do unlimited to its maximum 1/80000th of a second shutter speed with flash without high speed sync because the sensor turns on and off. Right? It doesn't scan. So with a global shutter that turns on and off and not a readout speed, you can do things that you can't do with any other camera. So in other words, you can sync with any flash at any speed. You don't need to use high speed sync, which means you don't have to reduce your flash power. You can shoot up to 1/80000th of a second, so freezing motion is incredible. There's no rolling shutter absolutely at all because there's no scan. So for video, it's an incredible video camera. I say this is the most underrated wedding photographer's camera in the world because there's no banding. So if you're shooting in any kind of mixed lighting, you're never gonna get banding, you're never gonna get flicker, you're never gonna get rolling shutter, you can shoot in any lighting condition with any flash. It shoots at 120 frames per second and not to say our competitors can't do that because some of them can shoot that high, however, they either lock focus on the first frame or they don't follow focus throughout or exposure. This camera at 120 frames per second, JPEG and RAW will make multiple calculations between each shot in order to track focus, and it has AI. Same with our new Alpha 1 Mark II and many of our other cameras have now also incorporated a dedicated AI sensor. So that's another trend that we should be talking about.

Pat Miller: 09:04

Oh, yeah. We gotta get into AI, and you shared how that's gonna change the way we shoot. You even shared with me, this camera's so advanced, it's gonna change the way manufacturers make lights. How is that gonna change?

El-Deane Naude: 09:15

So that's exactly it. Right? So previously, when you would need a more powerful light with a higher sync speed or a higher refresh rate, or if you're shooting at, let's say, for instance, you're outdoors, you wanna shoot at a shallow depth of field. Right? You're going to get a wide aperture that's going to allow more light through so you have to go a higher shutter speed. In order to get a higher shutter speed, if I want to overpower the sun, I either need a very powerful light but I also need high speed sync. Because you don't need to high speed sync with this, you can actually shoot with a lower power with a smaller flash that just syncs with this camera. I could shoot at 1/40000th of a second outdoors, make day into night, and basically illuminate my subject with a small flash. And it's incredible. We showed that last year here at Imaging. We had multiple demos where we're showing how you can actually utilize the camera. And people were like, "Oh, yeah. My camera can do that." I'd say, great. Here's the flash sync. You go ahead and you show me how to do this on your camera. They couldn't do it. Right? You can't do it. So there's very, very interesting shots, backlighting your subjects. There's some really cool images for sports photography that we've shown on this. But it basically tells your lighting manufacturers you no longer have to design a flash that has high speed sync, or you no longer have to worry about super high powered flashes to overpower the sun because you can actually do that with this camera. Right? So there's a lot of different things that you can do with a global shutter that you can't do with a regular rolling shutter camera or a focal plane shutter.

Pat Miller: 10:40

You said about lenses that we need to change the way we think about lenses, that lenses are now the product. Talk to us about that.

El-Deane Naude: 10:46

So this is one thing where I speak to a lot of photographers about. I purposely brought my 24-70 G Master Mark I. Right? We do have the Mark II, but I wanted to prove a point here that I've had this lens for many years now. Since we launched the Alpha 7R, we came out with a G Master series of lenses. Right? So this lens is, I don't know what, eight years old or something like that. I've probably had 10 different cameras behind this lens. Right? So is the lens the product or is the camera the product? I say the lens is the product, and the camera is the accessory, and you're gonna upgrade your accessory as you need it. Or I'm gonna have different ones that I'm gonna attach to the back of my lens. I might have a FX3 on the back because I'm gonna be shooting video, or I might have my ZV-E1 on the back of this lens because I might be doing something that's gonna be for a YouTube video, and I need to, you know, use the blogging functions that the ZV-E1 has. I might have my Alpha 9 on the back of it. So the lens is a thing that I have for many years. Right? I have a 300 f2.8 lens that was from the old Minolta era that, you know, became a Sony lens because it was out of the G factory that we took over from Minolta. And I've had that lens for almost twenty years, and it's seen many, many cameras on the back of it. Right? $7,000 at the time. So the idea of investing in a lens should be more important than investing in a body. And I say that a good lens on a good body is gonna give you good image. If you put a poor lens on a good camera, you're gonna get a terrible image. If I put a good lens on even an entry level camera, right? Even if I put it on, let's say, an Alpha 7 IV, sub $2,000 camera, it's gonna look incredible. Right? Because that's still a 33-megapixel, you know, Alpha full frame camera, but it's only less than $2,000. So I would rather have an expensive lens on a $2,000 camera than having a cheap lens on an expensive camera. So you need to think of five factors when buying a lens. Right? And mirrorless has really changed this. This is where mirrorless has changed the way the lens are designed. So you have to look at the five factors I say is image quality. Everybody wants that. You have to look at operability. Most people don't look at operability. The other thing is capability. What is the lens capable of? What is its performance like? A lot of people overlook that as well. The next thing is size and weight. This is a big deal that most people don't realize until you're a wedding photographer carrying two cameras. And you've got a 24-70 f2.8t and a 70-200 f2.8, or I'm a content creator and I'm going on a trip to Tokyo and I'm gonna take a backpack. And it's a difference between taking two lenses versus taking five lenses. Right? So size and weight is a huge factor that people should be considering. And then the final one, most people would say price, but I say value. Right? It needs to be based on what is the value that you assign to those other factors. So when people are looking at sharp images, a lot of companies make sharp images. Right? Canon makes sharp lenses. Sony makes sharp lenses. Nikon, you know, Tamron, Sigma, they all make sharp lenses. Right? Some of them are sharper than others. And let's face it, you know, if you have a look at a Canon L series, they're fantastic. Nikon makes some great lenses. Leica makes some incredible lenses. Our G series, Zeiss, similar kind of lens. Right? G Master takes it to that next level. And it's that optical performance and the design of those lenses that not only allow them to be sharper on the G Master, but also beautiful bokeh, beautiful defocused background. Because of that design, that entire factory was rebuilt with none of the parts ever used for previous lenses. They basically said, how do we design the lens for the future? Because Sony knew that we were going to be resolving for 50, 61 megapixels, 100 and beyond in the future. We need to make a lens that's going to be with you for ten, twenty years. You know, I've got a lens for twenty years. I need to be able to have that as a professional photographer. So that optical performance is important. Most people say, "Well, this lens is half the price. I'm gonna buy it if it's almost the same quality." Not the best. The operability is when you actually come to the actual lens. On most of our newer lenses, you've not only got a focus, a zoom if it's a zoom lens, might be a prime, doesn't have that, but also an aperture ring. And that aperture ring allows me for instant feedback or instant movement. I don't have to worry about dials or anything like that. I know if I'm in f2.8 and I click 2 twice this way, I'm in f4, right? Or if I'm shooting video, it's declickable. I can turn a switch off, and now I have a smooth iris and not a click because I don't want to click, click, click, click, click, like getting brighter, light in the dark, getting that noise in it. I have a focus switch. I have a focus hold button that is also programmable. So maybe I'm shooting with an Alpha 7R V and it's 61 megapixels, so I can crop and I wanna be able to crop in by 1.5. I can set that as a crop factor and I push that button, I crop in. I push it again, I crop out, right? So it gives me that operability of the lens. The next thing is the performance. So this is going into the history of how lenses focus. So originally, you'd have a mechanically coupled gear that has a helical barrel. So there's a barrel on the outside of the lens and the barrel on the inside. And what you do is you rotate this, and what it does is it goes on this helical spiral forward and backwards. So you're doing this rotational movement to get a linear motion. Then Minolta, that Sony eventually took over, came out in 1985 with a screw drive that can then connect from the body into the lens and screw drive that movement. Right? So that was the first autofocus. Nikon followed in '86, Canon followed in '87, and we have autofocus lenses. Then comes the invention of stepping motors. Stepping motor, if you listen to it, it goes click, click, click, click, click, click, but it's still moving rotationally to go forwards and backwards. Fast forward to supersonic wave motors. Sony had these on all our Zeiss lenses and all of our other lenses. In the original Alpha A mount series. Other companies followed as well, right. Canon calls it USM ultrasonic wave motor but basically it's a wave motor. You have a stator and you have a ring, a piezo type of motor and it expands and contracts. And what it does is as you put a current to it, it either expands and contracts in one direction or the other, and your lens will rotate again to move forward and backwards. And that's when you hear [buzzing] sound. Right? Then we said, okay. What happens if we wanna go mirrorless? Small and lighter camera, small and lighter lenses. What we need to do is make that in a linear motion. So we take that circular stator and we put it onto a ceramic plate with a stator on it, put the current through it, and an inch worms itself forwards and backwards. But now we've taken that rotational movement out of the camera. One barrel comes out of the other one, and all we have is the focus group connected to the linear, supersonic motor. Alright? So that'll move forward and backwards on that motion. Problem with that is when you're manually focusing and you pull focus from one to the next, it's fly by wire. So if I move it slowly this way from a to slowly to b, I'm at that point. If I go slowly to a again, I'm back at a. But if I move it quickly to b, it shoots up past that point. So it's not consistent. It's not accurate. Also, it makes that [buzzing] noise. So then Sony comes up with a more ingenious idea, and we have a floating focusing system, which is an electromagnet on a rod, and that doesn't touch. It's a floating focus system. So that lens group is now attached to that magnet that goes over the rod, and that can move forward and backwards. So there's multiple things. It's faster. It's 100% quiet because it's floating. It's smaller. It uses less power, and it's 100% accurate even when pulling focus because you could tell it that at point a on this rod is this point of focus, point b on the rod is this focus. I can move it slowly or fast in manual focus, and it's repeatable. So it becomes a video lens as well. Right? So those are the four factors in choosing the lens. Sorry. Three so far. That being smaller, lighter, the lens development is smaller, lighter. You get lighter and smaller lenses. So a lot of people will pick up a Sony lens and go, "Is this really good because it's half the weight of our competitors' lenses?" Yeah. Absolutely. Not only is it good, it's better. Right? And then you have to assign price to it. How much am I gonna pay for that? Now you can find other lenses in the market, and you can pick one or two of those things, and you can say, "Look. I'm gonna focus on image quality, so I'm gonna be willing to pay half the price." That's up to you as a photographer. Right? If you say, "Look. I want, you know, quality and operability," they find a lens that has that, and then you assign a value to it that you're willing to pay for that. As a professional photographer, I want to make sure that I'm picking the best lens possible for the future of my business. I don't wanna be reinvesting in lenses every time I buy a new camera. I'm like, "Oh, now I have video. I need a declickable switch. Now I gotta go and find a lens that does that. Or now I have a smaller camera in my bag. I wish I'd got the one with the XD linear motor instead of the one with the rotational one because now I wanna travel with it." So, you need to think about those things when you're purchasing a lens. And, you know, we estimate, I wouldn't say exactly how many years, but we're still so far in advance of our competitors in that space because we've been doing this for much longer. We've been working with mirrorless and hybrid cameras in terms of photo and video simultaneously for far longer than they have. And I think what's happened is a lot of the industry has had to adopt DSLR lenses to fit their new mirrorless system and having to play catch up with lenses. So we also have the widest range of lenses in both prime and in zoom. I think we have over 75 lenses now for the E mount system alone. Right? Also the widest range of, APS-C and full frame and power zoom lenses. So when you think of lenses that we're using on the FX30s over here, you know, they have a power zoom lever. That same lens that, you know, I can have that lens on my, you know, Alpha 9 Mark III, but if I put it onto my ZV and I want to power zoom, I can power zoom with it. I can control it with the, you know, you saw on the iPad how we're using Monitor & Control, I can be remote and I can zoom in and out remotely because it's the power zoom lens. You can't do that if you don't have a power zoom lens. So it's important to pick those features for what your purposes are.

Pat Miller: 20:13

Well, and that's the trend. The lenses are the product, and that gives us the point of view that we should be investing in the lenses, the ones that we need, not just for now, but also for the future. Okay. We gotta keep moving. We got way more we gotta cover. I know. It's awesome. It's so great. It's like staring into the sun.

El-Deane Naude: 20:29

Alright.

Pat Miller: 20:30

Okay, AI. I'm just gonna step back and let you go. I know you have a lot to say.

El-Deane Naude: 20:34

Yeah. So I think there's three points on AI that I wanna cover. So the industry trend at the moment is we're looking at generative AI. We're looking at AI in terms of performance and then also in terms of workflow. Right? So all three of those things are important. So let's address the elephant in the room, which is the generative AI. The biggest fear right now is that you can create stuff on AI. You can go on to, you know, Adobe Photoshop or, you know, other type of sites, you know, ChatGPT or whatever it is, and you can create something with AI that doesn't exist. And is it really real? So there's nothing that we can control there. However, we have a huge amount of journalists that use Sony cameras. And in the journalist market, especially in this day and age, especially in this day and age of, you know, political turmoil that we're going through, how do you know what's real and what's not real? So authentication is a very key factor to that. Now cameras incorporate authentication technology that you can prove if something is real or not. And this is something that we've been chatting to PPA about quite a lot. And I have a chat to David Trust on an occasional basis, and he's been, you know, instrumental in driving copyright protection for not only PPA members, but, honestly, the entire creative industry through government. So this is something that PPA is, you know, really working hard on for their members, but we also recognize that in terms of not only copyright, you know, you can prove this is my image. Right? But you could also prove that this is actually an image. And it's so intelligent that it also has 3D recognition. So in other words, I can't take a photo of a photo and say that it's my photo. It would actually recognize that's a photo of a photo because it doesn't have the 3D data that it captures. So this uses blockchain to track this information. It's burgeoning technology. It's really pivotal, especially at this particular time. So there's that generative and how to combat generative AI that's one part. The other part is performance. We have a dedicated AI chip in the camera, and our new cameras, including the Alpha 1 Mark II, the Alpha 9 Mark III, the Alpha 7R V, the 7C II, multiple of our cameras, the ZV-E1 even has the AI, and that has a way of improving the performance of the camera. So we can put in massive databases into that AI chip that do three things. You know, it's for focus, for white balance, and for exposure, and it can recognize subjects. So, you know, humans, cars, planes, trains, pets, you name it. It has recognition capabilities. Human form estimation, for instance, it even knows if I'm doing this, then I'm a human because it actually knows my form. It can tell. Okay, there must be an arm and a leg and a body. I could be lying on the floor, and says it that's a human. It can actually track that. You know, tracking vehicles, for instance, it knows the difference between a plane and a train and a car, and those types of things. And with the Alpha 1 II now as well, it has automatic sensing. So it knows what it's sensing as well. And you can select what you want it to track. You can select how many you want it to track one thing or another. But it'll also adjust, you know, white balance and exposure, for instance. So if I'm tracking a human and I put it on, you know, face or auto exposure, it's gonna expose for the proper skin tone. And then it knows the differences between light skins and dark skins. It's gonna expose for, you know, making sure that a person's face is correctly exposed versus the rest of the image, depending on what I'm shooting as well, and how I'm shooting. So it's very intelligent in terms of the way that it uses AI to increase the performance of the camera. It makes your job as a photographer easier. What we want to do is let you focus on creativity. You focus on communicating with your subject. You focus on tracking the action. You're following sports. You need to know what's happening on the field. You don't wanna be messing around with how do I do something. Right? You wanna be capturing the action. You wanna be tracking that car in a race. You wanna be communicating with your model and connecting with them and directing them.

Pat Miller: 24:26

And this is almost a smart camera that's gonna continue to get smarter and smarter as the technology grows, which then allows us to stay present and be an artist.

El-Deane Naude: 24:34

Absolutely. So it's not seen as taking over what you're doing, but it's seen as helping you enhance your craft by giving you the technology that the camera does its job in what it's supposed to do. Right? Let's face it. Those people are like, "Well, I don't need the camera to AI auto focus." Well, then why don't you buy one of those lenses that's manual focus and do it manual? Because if you wanna control everything, you can, but why not embrace the technology and make your job easier?

Pat Miller: 25:00

I wanna ask about workflow, the third pillar of AI in a second. But I do wanna ask you, in that secret room in Sony that humans like me can't enter, is the stuff the engineers are working on, does it just make your head explode? Is there really cool stuff coming?

El-Deane Naude: 25:15

You know, I'm always amazed. But I've also got to that point in my career where, you know, thinking outside of the box and pushing the envelope. And we do a lot of what we call proof of concept, and we do a lot of–one of the things that I think Sony is known for in the industry, and this took time to develop in the early days of Alpha, but it happened very quickly. And in the first ten years of Alpha, we won, I think, camera of the year, like, nine times. But the industry didn't recognize that. Right? People were like, "Oh, I'm still gonna use my system that I've always used." The difference is that Sony listens, and it goes throughout the organization. Right? And you'll see this in every product development that we do, not only just in the camera group, but actually throughout the organization when it comes to other products. And we take the voice of our customer very seriously. So we hear things a lot of the times that sound fantisful. And we have people going, "Wow. It would be really cool if you could do this." And a year later, I will go back to them and say, you know, you asked me for that, and here it is on the new model. And they're like, mind blown. Like, woah. You guys actually did this. I'm like, yeah, we actually did this. You know? And so, I think it's it's one of those things that I've learned to never underestimate what our engineers are capable of. And at the same time, I've never, you know, ceased to amaze when they come out and say, "Hey, by the way, we're gonna give you this." And I was like, wow. I never thought of that. That's amazing. You know? So there's a little bit of both. Right? They're always keen to respond, and they're always coming up with stuff that's just mind blowing.

Pat Miller: 26:42

We have more to tackle, but we gotta wrap up AI first. So let's talk about workflow and where we might be in the ballgame here. So let's do workflow first.

El-Deane Naude: 26:51

So workflow with AI is very interesting, and this is actually quite new. Only about, you know, three or four years old. Honestly, only in the last two years has really accelerated. And you've seen companies, you know, like Imagine, Evoto, and AfterShooting, you know, not missing out in your company, a few companies.

Pat Miller: 27:08

We love all of you. Yeah.

El-Deane Naude: 27:09

I can only mention a few. But we're very close to those companies. We chat to all of them, Adobe, and we're very interested in knowing what the professional workflow is. Because let's face it, you know, photographers, if I go back to my research about five years ago, we're taking, you know, 2,000 photos of weddings. You know, they're taking 10,000 photos of weddings now. How are they processing those images? How are you selecting them? You know, you used to go and go through your selects and pull everything. You can run that through narrative select now and pull, you know, based on your criteria, whittle down 10,000 images to a thousand. Run that through your choice of AI editing, which is based on your set. So you take, I've been shooting weddings for a year or two years, and I take the last two years that I've been shooting. I upload those edited images with the file data to the AI. The AI learns exactly how I edit and then says your next set that you upload that are RAW, I'm just gonna edit them for you and you get them back and you're like, wow. So I've selected all my images; I can go through the ones that I'm thinking, you know, maybe there's a few eyes closed that I wanted to get because the bride was, like, you know, an emotional moment. But upload those images, and within 15 minutes, I get an initial download, and it has all the Lightroom settings attached to it so I can go and tweak them if I need to. And then I'm done, and I'm like, okay. Now I need to run them through touch up because I'm only gonna touch up 50 images for my customer, and I run them through more AI and I said remove all their hair in front of people's eyes, remove all the bloodshot eyes, whiten all their eyes, you know. You could do all this type of stuff in AI. And within, you know, an hour, you can have whittled down 10,000 images, edited a thousand of them, touched up 50 of them, and uploaded them to your cloud services and delivered them to your client. Most people aren't delivering that quickly, though.

Pat Miller: 28:48

But that's the proof of concept for AI. Meaning it's not about doing our work for us because we don't wanna have our artistic vision. It's about being able to do more. And something like that, that might be an extra wedding or two a month. That changes the entire average of someone's business.

El-Deane Naude: 29:05

That's exactly it. It allows you to focus on your other parts of your business. It allows you to focus on your customer interactions. It allows you to generate new business. It also allows you as a creator to go out and do your own passion project. I might be doing weddings because it pays the bills, but honestly, I wanna do landscape photography. Guess what? Now I have two extra days a week to go out, you know, to Joshua Tree and go and take some photos. Right? So it really gives time back to people so that they can do more with their lives, spend more time with their family. You know? There are so many different things that you could do. So embracing how that works and how the technology works. And some people are like, "I don't trust AI." I said a lot of people said they didn't trust Photoshop. You know? But you bring your image in, and now you're tweaking all the stuff. You're still doing exactly the same thing, but you're just letting the machine do it for you first. You still have full control of what you wanna do and how you wanna put that out there. So adopting that technology, and I think that in itself as an industry trend is going to grow. I think AI is just in the beginning in terms of what it can do. It's not gonna replace you as a content creator. It's not gonna replace you as a business person. It's not gonna stop you from interacting with your customers or coming up with a creative vision. You still have to do that. But you can embrace the technology that helps you capture better images. You can embrace the technology that helps you improve your workflow and give you more time, and it can help you also protect yourself in terms of what you're doing. So AI, don't see it as a negative. See it as a positive.

Pat Miller: 30:30

All of the process improvements, the workflow enhancements, the AI onboard help us do better work. But Sony and PPA are getting together for the encryption, the image protection, the credibility, and authenticity. So while we are enjoying the advancements in technology, the industry is coming along with us to protect us. Those two things together, I think, will help build trust with AI and the adoption–

El-Deane Naude: 30:56

Absolutely.

Pat Miller: 30:57

–in the industry.

El-Deane Naude: 30:58

Yeah, asolutely.

Pat Miller: 30:58

Alright. We're almost out of time, but we still have video to go. We've gotta talk about video.

El-Deane Naude: 31:01

Let's get into that.

Pat Miller: 31:01

What are the trends in video?

El-Deane Naude: 31:03

So I think one of the things that anybody who's every–you know, everybody follows social media. When last did you see a still image? No. Right? And I just saw something really funny the other day. Some of the creators that we work with, somebody had posted a still image, but it was a video. It had voiceover. So it was a photo that they took that they wanted to be recognized on Instagram, but the Instagram algorithm is only looking for videos. So they actually said, "Hey, Instagram. This is a photo I wanted to show my followers, but it's a video. Suck it." So they know how to cheat the algorithm because the algorithm is only pushing video. Right? So they took an image, and they basically just created a short video out of it and put some voice over it. There you go. So I think the hybrid consumer, the hybrid photographer, needs to understand photo and video equally. The challenge with video has always been it's not capturing a moment in time. It's storytelling. And then also the editing part of it takes a long time. A lot of that has actually been improved through AI as well. So you can actually go to ChatGPT and say, "Help me tell a story about something." If you don't know how to do it yourself, right? Or what are the best methods to do this? So I'll give you an example of this. We just shot a video for our PDT-FP1 connectivity device, and we needed to create a storyboard. And we had the script. We had everything that needed to flow. We used AI to create the storyboard. And we said, you know, show us a scene that has a racing driver in a garage with a race car and a team in the background. That's scene one. Show me an image that has X, Y, and Z. So now we can get to the production team and we can say, okay. This is how we're gonna set this up. This scene needs to look like this. Right? We can set it up. We know how many actors and angles and all the other stuff, and you can play around with it. So we use that in a sense of helping our workflow again in order to create this video creation. So that part of it doesn't have to be that difficult. But learn how to shoot video. Learn how to take, you know, shoot video horizontal for vertical. Use your crop lines because you don't have to do a long form horizontal video, but most people are looking on their phones nowadays. And short form vertical video is the key. You don't have to turn your camera this way. Most short form video is only 1080. And if you got a 4K screen this way, you go about almost 1080 high anyway, so you can crop into that. So also learn how to shoot horizontal for vertical. Be able to frame your image and say, "Okay, I'm gonna frame you in a way that I know that I can crop you into a vertical form afterwards." And then in my storytelling, I can then use my short form video to then drive people to my long form one. So maybe I have a horizontal video on YouTube or maybe I'm promoting something on Vimeo or a customer's website, but I need to be able to shoot those verticals. That in itself expands your offerings to your customers. They hire you for a photo job and you say, "Do you have a social media team? Are you the marketing guys? Do you need a little bit of video? I'm already framing this image up. Can I just hit record and capture some of that video as well?" And am I framing it in a way that the marketing department wants to use it? They wanna use it in social media. They wanna use it in vertical. They wanna do Instagram and TikTok and YouTube Shorts. But, hey, guess what? I also want a wider video because I wanna tell a better story as well. So learn video.

Pat Miller: 34:19

And it's almost the tipping point now where if you are a photographer, I only do still. I do not do video. That's now a thing of the past. We need to learn this stuff.

El-Deane Naude: 34:30

I think so, 100%

Pat Miller: 34:31

And it's so much easier than it used to be. It's really much easier. It's really time-consuming and data transfers and, you know, programs that didn't work the same way, and now it's just being streamlined. And it's now just the cost of doing business.

El-Deane Naude: 34:43

Absolutely. And, you know, the tools can all do this now. You know, gone are the days where the 5D Mark II was the only camera that could do video. That broke the industry. You could use a DSLR to shoot video. That was incredible. Then the Alpha 7S came along and killed that market, and everything switched over to the Alpha 7S. And then, you know, and it's been back and forth with different cameras. And now we've got dedicated cameras for dedicated uses, but let's face it. A lot of the cameras can do the same thing over and over again. So, also, it helps you pick the camera that's kind of best for your use case scenario. Right? So if you have a super high resolution camera, they typically aren't the best for video. But if you have a lower resolution, it is good for video. But there's trade-offs on both sides of it. But have a look at what, you know, the majority of your work is. And if you need to buy a second camera that does video, you could do that as well depending on your budgets as well. Back to the lenses. Make sure that your lens is capable. If you're going to go down the video route, which I think everybody should, make sure that your lens is capable of capturing video, being able to follow the focus. Don't make a noise while you're shooting because maybe you need to use that audio. Right? Focus breathing is a big deal. You know, focus breathing compensation is a big deal. Our cameras can actually do focus breathing compensation. It knows that this is 24-70 f2.8 G Master Mark I, and it knows that if I'm at this focus point, you know, it's going to be a slightly wider and if I focus back to a shallower depth, it's gonna change it. I'll bring that into my software afterwards, like Catalyst, and I can correct that, which is amazing.

Pat Miller: 36:10

We're talking about trends. We do need to learn video, but also the stakes are being raised. Cinematic video is now a thing. It has to be not just good enough. It has to be great. Talk to us about cinematic video.

El-Deane Naude: 36:22

That is a really good point. So there's a lot of things that go into cinematic production. So you gotta ask yourself what is cinematic. I speak to a lot of people, and they're like, "Oh, cinema is 24p." But if you know the history about 24p, I call BS on it. Right? That was because film was shot at 24 frames a second, and it's because it's the slowest that they could make film because film costs money. So if I shot at 100 frames a second, I'm going through a lot more film. What's the slowest I can go that human motion still kinda looks human? I still don't think 24p looks human. You still see a little bit of staccato. You're never gonna shoot football in in 24p. You know, why would you? Because you're gonna miss shots. Right? So some people think it's 24p. Some people think that it's, you know, anamorphic or 21 x 9 aspect ratio. Some people think it's the color. It's actually a combination of all of those things. It's a combination of the look and the feel that you get out of a video, that shallow depth of field, right? Versus video that's just everything–or watching TV and everything's, like, in full focus. So it's a creative vision of how do you set aside something that looks more cinematic, that looks more produced? The cameras are at your disposal nowadays. They can do that. You have full frame sensors. You've got, you know, wide aperture lenses. I mean, you can buy an 85 f1.8 Sony for $800, and it's an incredible lens and it's great for video. Right? So you can get that shallow depth of field on a budget as well. So getting that shallow depth of field, being able to go into, you know, the camera and set it up with with LUTs and picture profiles. So lookup tables are something that people could import. They're downloadable. You wanna go and get a LUT that looks like James Cameron, you could download that and apply it to your camera. Not a problem. You can now shoot like, you know, what he was shooting at. Those are available to people. So learning how that works and being able to produce more cinematic is gonna get more views. Right? When we started looking at wedding videographers, when the switch went to DSLR and then mirrorless, we saw a dramatic switch from half an hour long videos of people shooting the wedding vows and the speeches to five-minute videos that were cinematically produced, that had beautiful music, that told a story, that went back and forth, and a snippet here and a snippet there, and you got to get ready, and you got a little bit of the vows, and you got a little bit of this, and you got a little bit of that. People are gonna watch that video a hundred times versus watching something else.

Pat Miller: 38:35

They'll get watched.

El-Deane Naude: 38:36

Right. You know? Sony Artisans, Eyenamics, go and watch one of their videos. You know? Amber & Garrette, they make incredible cinematic videos. If anybody's not doing that nowadays, you're not gonna get a job in wedding video. And we've seen that trend go to YouTube. YouTube videos have become more produced. Right? That's the new media. Do you know anybody who still has a cable box?

Pat Miller: 38:59

Yeah. Right. No.

El-Deane Naude: 39:00

No. Everybody streams. Right? But if you go to YouTube, how do you separate yourself? If you're gonna be, you know, providing your customers video, how do you separate yourself from the rest? So learn how to make cinematic videos.

Pat Miller: 39:11

Sure. Last word on video. Brag on Sony for a minute. You're everywhere that someone would wanna be with your lenses. You do all the big stuff. Brag on Sony for a second.

El-Deane Naude: 39:22

So when we have a look at the levels within cameras. Right? You've got companies like ARRI and Sony Venice at the top fighting for for the big dogs. I think we had more Oscar nominees this year than ARRI, which is great. But major motion pictures. Right? You know, Avatar shot on Sony. Top Gun shot on Sony. I mean, there's hundreds of shows, Gran Turismo shot on Sony Venice. That, you know, Venice and Venice II. That's the high end. As you come down, you've got other camera brands that are in the next space that, you know, ready to compete with Sony in that space. I don't know what's happening now since they've been bought by Nikon; I haven't been following exactly what they're doing with it. But Sony has the next level of cameras as well. We've got the Burano, then we're going to the FX6, a lot of FX9, FX6, a lot of documentary production. Canon's got their C series that kinda comes in at that level as well. Then we come into, you know, your FX3 and FX30 competing with, like, you know, Canon and Blackmagics of the world. And then even down into the entry-level market, you know, our ZV series that steps people out of a cell phone into video. And as video features, our ZV-E10 Mark II, our ZV-1 Mark II, they have cinematic vlog feature that you can put a–you hit a button, and it gives you a 21 x 9 display. It forces them into 24p and applies a cinematic LUT to the image already. So with a, you know, affordable vlog style camera and it's also got a vertical UI, I can then say cinematic vlog feature. I wanna shoot this cinematically. Bam. Everything is done for me. I just hit a button, and it gets it done. So we compete in that whole range within our video series. Our cinema line is obviously our pinnacle, but that doesn't mean that any of our Alpha cameras aren't as robust. They have features that these don't. These have features that those don't. So this is an optical viewfinder. You don't need that on a cinema camera that has an integrated, you know, body with a microphone that can attach to the top, cooling fan that you can run it for extended periods of time. We've been running this setup for eight hours a day. We have these three cameras running for eight hours a day, and we haven't turned them off.

Pat Miller: 41:33

No.

El-Deane Naude: 41:34

And they just keep on running because they have integrated fans. Try that with another mirrorless camera that doesn't have cooling system. Right? So on the cinematic side, we have a line of cameras. So when we have a look at the Sony cameras, the cinematic side line, Alpha, we say is the hybrid camera, photo and video. And then our ZV series is more for your online content creator and it has specific features. It has things like product showcase feature, right? So if I hold the product up in front of it, it's going to focus on the product and not continue focusing on my eyes. If I want to defocus the background, I don't have to be shooting and then go, "Oh, I need to defocus the background. What's the aperture?" And change my aperture. Or what's the aperture? I can say, "Oh, defocus the background." Push the button. Ping. Ping. Defocused. Wide aperture. Defocused. Oh, somebody's behind me. Hit the button. They come back into focus.

Pat Miller: 42:17

And all of these features and all of these gears, like, everything you just described is awesome. But to the layman, Super Bowl, NFL, halftime show, NHL, I mean, Sony is everywhere.

El-Deane Naude: 42:28

Everywhere. If you're watching the Super Bowl, guaranteed it's gonna be shown on Sony. Even the halftime show has been, you know, produced on Venice cameras, cinematic cameras, sideline cameras. Most of the photographers are using Sony cameras with our PDT-FP1 to transfer images directly back to their photo editor in real time. A lot of the broadcast is actually happening with those as well, so yeah.

Pat Miller: 42:51

Unbelievable.

El-Deane Naude: 42:52

Sony's everywhere. Yeah.

Pat Miller: 42:53

We could go on and on because the industry trends are coming out of Sony, and you're just such an expert. I really appreciate your time. And just as an aside from me to you, thank you for your guidance here this week at Imaging for doing all the hard work to make us look great. I really appreciate it.

El-Deane Naude: 43:07

You're welcome. It's been fun for me. Thank you.

Pat Miller: 43:09

El-Deane, thanks for coming on the podcast. I appreciate it.

El-Deane Naude: 43:12

I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Cheers.

Pat Miller: 43:14

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of The Professional Photographer Podcast. This has been the deep dive on industry trends. It's been a lot of fun. I hope you've enjoyed it. Now we're gonna gauge whether or not you enjoyed it because if you didn't enjoy it, don't click like and subscribe. But you did enjoy it. Right? So you're going to click like and subscribe. Right? And you're gonna leave us a comment and tell us what you liked about our guest today. That helps us and the team kinda know if we're doing the right stuff or if we need to go get a job at Dunkin Donuts or something like that. So please leave us a comment, like, and subscribe to the YouTube channel. Also, if you're not a member of PPA, we need to have a real conversation. Because if you're trying to build a photography business, PPA is for you. We're talking top-notch equipment insurance. We're also talking about education. This show and so much more is made possible by PPA. So if you like getting better at photography, PPA is there for you as well, not to mention the sense of community with photographers that are all trying to get better and build their business. At PPA, you belong here. Register now and sign up for the group ppa.com. That's ppa.com. Thanks for tuning in to The Professional Photographer Podcast. I'm Pat Miller. We'll see you right here next time. Take care.