Pretty Fly (for a Camera Guy)

Say what you will about gatherers of the past, but they sure were some dapper broadcasters.What else do you call a guy who - with half a dishwasher strapped to hsi back - STILL cares enough to rock a woolen suit, shiny wristwatch and six hardened ounces of Bryl-Creme?And don't tell me it's just an ad. Amanda Emily has unearthed stacks of actual photos showing cameramen (always men) dressed to impress with one eye open. Did they stay that way all dy? Did the razor sharp edges of all that technology snag their pleated trousers? Did that pre-space age antenna tousle their high and tight? Did they ever 'pit-out' like a modern day news warrior decked out in cargo shorts and a greasy T? Don't answer, just know any surviving shots of yours truly and friends won't age quite so gracefully. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to glean my least-wrinkled flowery shirt from the bottom of the closet... Tomorrow's picture day.

Grief on Demand

As one who craves indelible images, I can tell you yesterday slaked my thirst in a most unsettling way. It began with a smoldering home; a modest trailer soaked in cinders and warped by lethal heat. It caught us by surprise. Sure, Sheeka and I knew we were headed to a fatal fire, but between the GPS and the dashboard chatter, we almost forgot why we were racing to Boonville. That changed the moment we arrived, for the family members pouring out of the gutted mobile home were inebriated with grief. I can't blame them. Nor can we as news-gatherers really help them; the most we can do is spotlight their plight and hope some benevolent spectator soothes their wounds with generosity. Try telling that to a couple of teenage boys as they bury the dog that died by their Mother's side the night before. Or better yet, don't. They'll notice you and your lens in time.

Approaching a loved one as they mourn is indelicate, at best. Handled wrong, it can be horrific - but with enough empathy and tact this grim business can be settled quickly, with neither survivor or spy losing too much of their soul. I know it sounds harsh, but the gentle inquisition of a victim's friends and family is as much a part of newscasts as the heavily edited press conference. I didn't exactly blaze a path up the widow's porch; that ground was covered long before I took up the lens. But in twenty years of television, I've had to knock on more mournful doors than I try to remember. But when you've zoomed in on as many tears as I have, those memories stick with you whether you want them too or not. So I follow my own prime directive: Do No Harm. It's a rule we followed far more often then the enemies of the Fourth Estate would have you believe, but since when do self-appointed experts really know much anyway?

Not very often, I've found - which is why I ignore convention avoid bad karma. You want me to bum-rush a funeral and demand some answers? Not gonna happen. You need to me to appear on the edge of some stranger's heartbreak, maybe ask for a picture or two? Yeah, I can do that. I've done it reluctantly a hundred times and while it's never easy, it's possible to pull off without causing too much collateral damage. Take yesterday. When Sheeka and I got out of the car, the sorrow was as thick as the humidity. Youngsters wept as they pulled what they could out of the trailer's remains. One boy in particular stalked back and forth with a pistol jammed in his waistband. Sheeka and I exchanged looks but little more. Instead, she approached the first adult she could find and quietly introduced herself. I meanwhile hung back and shot video from the safety of my sticks.

That seemed to be all the space the family needed, for they went about their grim tasks without demanding I ground my lens. Had they done so, I would have complied, for though it may irk some of my perceived superiors, I'm not going to do anything with a camera that'll make me stare at the ceiling all night. My less than heroic moments tend to play there on a loop. So I keep my karma clean, knowing no TV news story is worth me enhancing someone's misery. Besides, more often than not, the people WANT to talk. I can't explain it, I don't know what it says about our society. All I can tell you is that most folk want to brag on their beloved, effect whatever message might be brewing and maybe even set the record straight. I can help them do that and more times than not that tearful interview is followed by a thank you and even the occasional hug.

Too bad we don't put THAT on the air.

Eyes Without a Face

Even though I can't see Sean Browning's lips, his latest self-portrait speaks to me. Maybe that's because it encompasses all that I loathe and adore about our lowly craft. The coiled adrenaline, the assured discomfort, the press-pass that grants admission to the next twenty misadventures. It's the very same verve that caught my eye so long ago, when I looked up from a ballgame I hated to see a version of my future I'd one day learn to love. He was a newspaper photographer slumming his way through another assignment. I was a boy thunderstruck by the notion that you didn't have to join some stupid club just to belong. Not when you could arm yourself with lenses and push your way past the pack. I knew then that photojournalism was for me; I just wasn't sure the discipline. Years later, I conned my way into a job that offered far more than shitty pay and unreasonable hours. It afforded me unending access to pabulum, gasbags and tragedy. It promised me years of indelible images seared into my frontal lobe - all for the price of a little lower back pain. It gave me a backstage pass to more passion plays and crash scenes than I could ever to learn to stomach. Most of all, it taught me no heavily-edited retrospect could replace the sensation of being there, boots on the ground, lens in thick of it. Thus, when I run across a shot like the one above, I don't need a lot of background to know that behind that mask, our heavily weathered subject is grinning, if only a little.

Just don't ask him why. Some things are hard to explain...

Stuff I Never Told You...

I've damn near made a career of whining about my job, but a glance at my calendar shows how good I got it. Take July; a summer month not known for its stellar television. Still, with a flock of photogs on vacation and even more news-makers pretending to be, I managed to pack in enough surreal situations to keep my little repository of thought here bristling with piss, vinegar and the occasional insight. Why there was even stuff I never got around to mentioning....

Back on the 9th, I bum-rushed perhaps my twentieth Native American Pow-Wow. I'd only been there a few minutes when what was either a shaman in the grip of a religous vision or a cross-state trucker on half a bag of mushrooms approached with what appeared to be a necklace made of salt-shakers. "Bawitdaba da bang a dang diggy diggy" he said, shaking the suddenly smoking salt shakers at the sweaty cameraman. Actually, I don't know what he said; I was too busy trying to figure out whether I should film, thank or deck him. I opted for the middle way, and mouthed some old Neill Young lyrics at him as he shook the smoke at me and mumbled something back about being the walrus. I chuckled as he did, but soon after he passed I realized that's exactly how more than one Stephen King books start.

Less than a week later, I raced to a village on the Northern edge of Rockingham County so desolate, so remote that I've already forgotten its name. We'll call it Hell - not for it's many sinners, but for the very fact that it was about six hundred degrees Fahrenheit the day I rolled into town. My mission: get in front of a slow-moving convoy of wide-load trucks as they inched a massive generator ever so closer to its new power plant home. I've had good luck with Big Things Moving. Three story mansions, one room churches, library wings: I've hop-scotched around them all as real men in hardhats held power lines apart. Ancestral homes are the best, as the many descendants of the folks who used to live there often trail behind on foot in a slow parade of wistful soundbites. But a hunk of unemotional metal being dragged down a ribbon of rural highway? Not so much. Sure, there were a few woodchucks upset that about all the commotion, but I could tell by the way the fat one kept givin' me the eye-gouge, they weren't talking.

By the 22nd of July, the Piedmont was entering its sixth week of August-like temperatures. In fact the heat became so unbearable it was all anyone could talk about. That included of course the air conditioned souls who hurl me into the great unknown on a daily basis. I'm no longer surprised at what they come up with and most days, neither are they. On that particular day, the brain trust was focused on our bovine viewers. "What pray tell, was the heatwave doing to local dairy cows?" I shrugged a non-response and wondered which one of them listened to the Farm Report on the way to work. But I didn't dawdle, as the guys in Graphics were already searching their database for a picture of Bessie to hang over our anchor's shoulder. So I got busy flipping through my mental Rolodex until I half-remembered a certain cattle farmer I'd interviewed in the past. Hours later, as I followed my new friend through a cloud of black, bloated flies - I wondered how I could share this experience with the cubicle rats back at the station. Luckily, the half inch of moist cow shit that remained stuck to my shoes all day took care of that.

Of course not every news story is as well planned as a stroll through nature's landmines. On Tuesday I managed to pull a full morning of thwarted phone tag, before arranging a hurried shoot at a microbiology science camp. Several rack focuses later, I bid the campers a seemingly fond adieu and made my way through a summertime, visions of dry edit bay dancing in my head. I never made it. Five minutes into my return trip, the bosses called. Seems a lightning strike had sparked a fire at a building at the college I'd just left and the grown-ups in the newsroom no longer gave a rat's ass about some silly science camp. Suddenly I was late - a fate I more than adjusted with my stuntman worthy driving skills. Just ask the fire chief who I tailgated toward a building with a distinct lack of smoke plume rising from it. When the chief jumped a curb I did likewise, but I made the mistake of parking too early by a cluster of fire trucks. Little did I know the hoses ran to the other side of the building. By the time I hustled my gear to a respectable vantage point, my glasses were askew, my boxers were wet and a couple of campus cops were thinking of new reasons to push me back a block or two.

Who needs some old Indian curse when you got a job like mine? Don't answer that. I got a powerful hankerin' for sun-baked cow pie as it is...

Dance Hall Daze

What little I know about fancy dancin' can be etched into the side of a Cheeto, but that didn't stop me from strolling through the rehearsal halls at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts the other day. Actually, it was more of a forced march - as I was low on cutaways and high on deadline. Still, Gary Taylor and his crack staff of choreographers understood that the cameraman was in a hurry, so they did what every good subject should do: they ignored me. Thus, I was free to shuffle from one well-lit open space to another, leaving a trail of mud-chunks from the structure fire my tripod and I had waltzed through the day before. I swear, one of these days I'm gonna take all the time in the world to file one of these reports, instead of bum-rushing the scene before runing away with whatever impressions I managed to collect in under an hour... Who am I kidding? Certainly not the talented young dancers who put up with my presence as they practiced their pirouettes. They knew the photog was just passing through and probably didn't understand what he was looking at anyway. To be honest, I didn't - but I did manage to act all cultured and not knock over a single ballerina.

I'm just sorry I kept belting out the hook from 'Fame'. That was wrong.

Trackside Fashionista

A good photog knows how to blend, how to become part of the backdrop, how to see and not be seen. That's why when the photog affectionately known as 'Chim-Chim' wades into the Madhouse that is Bowman Gray Stadium on race night, he does so in audacious, trademark style. A high-octane orange shirt, delightfully oversized rig and trousers so splashy they confuse airplane pilots splashing overhead. But I come not to mock the wily Amernick, but to praise him. See, he's a highly-seasoned shooter, a fierce competitor and a funny guy who really knows how to kill time at a crime scene. Who cares if his pretty new bride is dressing him in Garanimals? I don't but - but then again, I once wore faded jorts and a wrinkled hula-girl shirt to an autopsy presser. No wonder they didn't invite me back.

Let's Get Physical...

Perhaps it's my blue-collar upbringing, or maybe it's my learned disdain for academia - but a recent study really chaps my batteries. Actually, the study has some merit, for in elucidating the obvious it finds that the newfangled crew of one (read:VJ) is capable of only pre-planned, simplistic mews coverage. That is true, to a point. For example, I shoot, write and edit TV news stories sans assistance every day - by choice. Such an arrangement affords me the kinf of freedom and autonomy most photogs can only dream of. I like it - a lot. Still, I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to voice my own reports again. Here's why I don't: The moment I go back on-air as a one-man-band, my bosses will throw me to the wolves, er, expect me to play full-on reporter.

No longer will I be able to waltz into the morning meeting and cherry-pick the the most visual story of the day. I'd be required to come up with lead stories, schmooze prickly contacts and cover city hall. Out with the biker club prayer breakfast. In with the heated city council meeting. No thanks, I've climbed the widow's porch solo as a younger man and while it's not beyond me, I simply garner no joy from standing by live outside the meth-lab. Sooo, I hide behind capable anchors with far smoother delivery than mine and foist actual happy news upon an unsuspecting public. It's a living...

And not a bad one, I might add. As practiced as I am in the art of whine, I truly dig what I do. Which is why I take such O-ffense at the study in question's other key assertion...

Another struggle for many VJs is the physical strain of working alone. “This is a craft that demands not only intellectual capacity but real physical stamina and a lot of people are not going to be able to do this simply because they haven‘t got the stamina,” one VJ says. ... The National Union of Journalists in England is starting to hear health complaints–such as exhaustion or back problems–from VJs who have been on the job a few years. There’s also the problem of doors. As mundane as they are, doors pose problems for VJs because their hands are nearly always full, and they have no partner. Getting through a door with the equipment, and protecting the equipment from being damaged by a slamming door, is a daily challenge. (One VJ reports a new appreciation for automatic doors!)

Don't get me wrong, humping gear up a courthouse's steps all by your lonesome CAN be a bitch. I do it every day. But photogs have been doing it daily since the first broadcast engineers traded a few horse blankets for an Indian-stitched test pattern. Try as I might, I cannot recall a single breathless study decrying the health risks suffered by generations of TV stevedores. And with good reason. See, even when the average news shooter schlepped 60 pounds of gear on his or her back, it just doesn't compare to actual backbreaking work like , say, appliance repair or ostrich farming. No matter how stridently I might disagree after a long shift of the one-eyed backpedal, electronic news-gathering is not the long haul some would have you believe.

Rather, it's a brisk run through someone else's reality - often followed by a stop at Starbucks for a Java Chip Frappuccino and a little handheld wi-fi. To compare carrying a fetus-cam around for an hour or two a day to actual labor does a great disservice to working folks everywhere and I want to do everything I can to distance myself from such self-serving horseshit. Am I being too sensitive? Probably, but when journalists of any stripe start complaining about their jobs being too physically strenuous, I'm more than a little sickened. Can field crews have a rough go of it once in awhile? Youbetcha. But can a lusty ingenue toting an eight pound camera compare to the many travails of a factory worker or traffic cop? Not on her worst day.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a shelf full of self-serving trophies not to polish. I gotta tell you though: my back is killing me!