Via aphotoeditor, the cover photo of Esquire magazine featuring Megan Fox wasn’t created with a still camera…

what?

Esquire says it’s the first time in  “history (and, we imagine, magazine history in general), a cover image was shot as a video.”

really?

Photographer-director Greg Williams (who, by the way, is an amazing commercial photographer) recorded ten minutes of Megan Fox using the RedONE video camera which can record at four times the resolution of high definition, capturing “loosely scripted footage with Fox — getting out of bed, rolling around on a pool chair, inexplicably lighting a barbecue.”

“It allowed her to act,” Williams says. “She could run scenes without being reminded by the sound of a shutter every four seconds that I was taking a picture. As in still photography, a lot of it is capturing unexpected moments. This takes that one step further.”

Capturing video and grabbing a video frame grab for still publication isn’t exactly new — we do it everyday in the pages of the Post-Dispatch using our Canon XH-A1 video cameras. It can be a blessing, because in a situation like last week’s funeral of Pfc. David Woodruff, I was silent. There wasn’t a single shutter click, and while we strive to be as absolutely quiet as possible during private moments, there is the inherent downside of a loud shutter.

Unfortunately, the downside of video still frames, even from high definition cameras, is still the borderline quality issue. While the 1920×1080p high-def image sounds great on paper, the real-life translation from screen captures on newspaper print deadlines are often pretty shaky. While they reproduce okay in the print edition, there isn’t much room for enlarging or cropping the video still grab image.

But what the RedONE offers — a still frame from a video that’s comparable to our Canon 1D Mark IIn cameras, is quite amazing. I’m quite confident proclaiming that we’ll be seeing more and more still shoots created with ultra-high resolution video cameras like the Red.

“I think it’s working. The covers are creating buzz and along the way they will inevitably stumble upon something innovative for magazine covers. The RedONE may be it but not because I think people want to watch a 10 min. video of someone posing for a cover. Something interesting will come out of this, maybe they can create cool animated cover badges from all the frames around the shot to spread around the web or maybe it just changes the way subjects and photographers work together for cover shoots.”

–aphotoeditor.

But for a magazine with heavy resolution requirements, this is a remarkable advancement. I was just recently looking at Vincent Laforet’s recent surf work — also shot with the RedONE camera — and thought to myself that the quality of the still frame grab must be outstanding.

There’s also the online component of video that is enticing. Just look at the cover tease for Fox. She how she (okay, before I go on, be forewarned parents that it gets a little “hot-in-herre”), um, addresses her less-clothed areas. Note how they placed the video on the cover. Now that is pretty darn cool. That’s the beauty of print-online-packages. They just make the piece so much more engaging for the viewers and readers.