-MJ

Is it worth buying a new camcorder with “still shot” functionality?

As a beginner, I have been snatching still shots from old videos using various kinds of free software.

http://www.dvrplayground.com/article/14906/Frame-Capture-Using-VideoReDo/;jsessionid=0BF3237A1695401090434D2317BFE49C

following instructions, it was really no problem.
But is the quality of the still shot improved it they come from a camcorder with that still shot functionality?

Or is it really no improvement over grabbing from old graduation videos and family picnics?

Thanks

-MJ

Also, it looks like Mr.Yairi used a fisheye lens for some of his work. If you have any info on that I would be delighted to learn from you.

Thank you.
DCD

From Peter Marshall,
Your Guide to Photography.
June 29, 2005
Forevermore: The Hansen Project
In the 1860s, Mrs. Von Keffenbrink-Ascherade, a German
Moravian (Protestant) woman, was so moved by seeing the leper
colony in Jerusalem that she set up a committee, bought land and
built the JESUSHILFE, a leper hospital. Twenty years later in 1887
an enlarged building was added by architect Conrad Schick (1822-
1901) a German missionary who planned and built many of the city
developments of the time. The hospital continued to be staffed by
German nursing sisters, even when Britain took over responsibility
for Palestine after the First World War. During the 1948 Jewish-
Arab war, the hospital became part of Israel, and its running was
taken over by the Israeli government.
In 1873, Dr Gerhard Armauer Hansen in Norway discovered the
cause of leprosy was a bacterium, and more recently the disease
has been known as Hansen’s disease and the hospital is the
Hansen Hospital for Skin Disease. The Hansen Hospital is still
apparently used as a clinic for some treatments of the disease, but
is no longer residential but its rooms are largely empty, in many
places left exactly as when they were last occupied. As well as the
fine buildings, it also has 2 acres of notable gardens, also created
in 1887 and taking their inspiration from the bible.
Shmuel Yosef Agnon (b 1988, Ukraine, d 1970), the first Israeli
writer to receive the the Nobel Prize for Literature (shared with
Jewish poet Nelly Sachs) in 1966, used the hospital as the setting
for his novel ‘Shira’ (published after his death 1971, but set in the
1930s-40s) and the short story ‘Forevermore’, published in 1954.
Photographer Yuval Yairi’s ‘Forevermore: The Hansen Project’,
currently on show at the Andrea Meislin Gallery in New York (until
July 29, 2005) and also opening July 15, 2005 at the Tel Aviv
Museum, Israel is an exploration of the very special spaces of the
Hansen Hospital. Rather than use an individual image, Yairi works
with a digital video camera on a tripod, taking hundreds or
thousands of single frames from a single position, each showing a
very small area of the scene. These small fragments of space and
time - often including changed aspects of the scenre, for example
where a figure has moved - are then combined and layered to
produce a single colour image.
It is an effective method which gives a unique feeling to the
images, a kind of emptiness or absence, combining an accurate
representation with a dreamlike quality. You can see reproductions
of nine of the images at the Andrea Meislin Gallery site, and
around 35 at Yuval Yairi’s own web site.