Back to the beach this week, inspired by the genius of Martin Parr. If you don’t know who Martin Parr is and you like photography go learn…

I’ve spent the weeks since my nieces wedding studying people shots, trying to understand what a good people shot looks like. With this in mind, I took the shot on the left…I didn’t get it quite right…but I’m having a lot of fun trying!

I don’t often have views on gear…but this is a bit of landmark. Nikon have finally managed to squeeze a video mode into their latest DSLR, the D90.

It’s incredible to watch the passionate reaction to this on the dpreview forums…these forums can be really aggressive but very informative and I’m amazed by the brand loyalty and complete lack of objectivity highlighted by some of the people who post.

The D90 announcement was welcomed on dpreviews Nikon forum and derided on their Canon forum. Despite the fact we all know that the Canon R&D people won’t be sleeping until they work out how to put video onto the next EOS. Canon also announced their 50d this week…to a fairly lukewarm reaction…..bigger processor, some additional bells & whistles, but no video mode or other ground breaking deal. Round 1 to Nikon then. BUT, the successor to Canons excellent 5d is supposedly around the corner so this year’s battles are far from over.

As a neutral it’s great to watch, also I have enough trouble trying to get still images right, there’s no way I could shoot decent video!

But the idea of using macro, zoom and wide angle lenses to shoot video must have appeal to a lot of people. I would imagine that for the average amateur looking to move from Point & Shoot to DSLR, the presence or lack of video could be a deal breaker. I was that person a year ago and it sure would have impressed me, newbies tend to look for feature rich cameras rather than image quality, or the lens range or anything else.

I think it’s great - Nikon continue to innovate and challenge Canon’s market share. As do Olympus and Pentax and Sony on a smaller scale. Whilst this competition exists, we’ll keep getting new concepts and ideas on our new cameras. I wonder what the next big thing will be?