NEW YORK, United States — First video killed the radio star, now digital video appears poised to kill off the still photographer.

Armed with HD digital video that’s ever-higher in quality, photographers can now shoot moving images with the crispness and clarity of still photos. This raises an interesting dilemma for image-makers across art, fashion and advertising alike: why bother with photographs anymore?

Earlier this year, a video of Megan Fox in a bathing suit circulated online, followed by a cover story in Esquire magazine featuring images that were outtakes — screen grabs, essentially — from the video. Both were credited to celebrity portrait photographer Greg Williams, whose work has always referenced scenes from movies. But for Esquire, he wasn’t just making photographs that look like film stills – he took actual stills from a video that had already been widely distributed on the internet.

Magazines have long used online videos to support their editorial content, but the video featurettes were almost always supplementary. The printed photograph was still the prime focus of the piece and publishers and photographers were always careful to save the best material — the photographs themselves — for the print publication. That’s all starting to change.

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