Fritter and Waste...

TV News. It ain't ALL high speed chases and breathless live shots. Quite regularly, the pace of the hunt slows to nearly unbearable levels. Nowhere is this phenomenon more common that when engaging the judicial system - where cameras aren't always allowed in court. It's when the committed lenslinger has to tap into the powers of inattention that landed him such a silly gig to begin with. Don't believe me? Just ask Paul Martin, who demonstrates the proper loitering technique all the way from across the pond. Of course NOW we all just stare at our Blackberry, iPod or Droid, but you get the idea...

Valor On Tap

In a world where television journalists are considered to be lower life forms than lawyers, it's refreshing to see reality trump perception. Case in point: Rob Cook. Wednesday night the WLEX photojournalist was driving his station's satellite truck to Houston for the Final Four. Just outside that city, Cook witnessed a fiery car crash up ahead. A car hit a median; a fire ensued and smoke soon filled the interior. That's when Rob Cook acted on instinct and in doing so, elevated our profession. He approached the burning car, ripped out a window and pulled a woman to safety. Another Good Samaritan managed to free a second passenger. Soon after, flames engulfed the car. Both occupants of the car received minor injuries, but thanks to Cook and others, they lived to tell the story. Heroic? Youbetcha. But of the photogs I know, 3 out of 4 would have attempted the same. That makes us no better than any other wage earners, but it does make us decent human beings with our compassion intact. Sadly, that's a news flash to some. So here's to YOU Rob Cook. We've never met, but I know your type. I work with and compete against them everyday.

Dichotomy's Rot

Okay, this is the part of the show where I pull a few fresh photos and assign some irony to them. To be honest though, it's Sunday night: in the past two days I've ridden 18 hard mountain bike miles, quelled a few sibling insurrections and changed the cat box a time or two. I'm tapped out. Still, it's my self-appointed duty to provide cogent cameraman analysis, so here goes...

Anoop Desai is a nice guy. (Hey, that rhymed!) He's also the smartest American Idol contestant you'll run across at Charlotte's Freedom Park. That's where Shannon Smith and I met him Thursday morning, not quite by accident. See, we're putting together a 'Where Are They Now' piece on some North Carolina Idols and that kind of thing would simply be incomplete without a visit with everyone's favorite UNC Grad student turned R&B singer. Anoop (Dawg) is done with Idol, of course, but he's still making music. Currently unsigned, he's living in Atlanta and shopping his tunes around town. It can't be easy. Don't get me wrong: Anoop's got serious vocal chops and a helluva brain to go with it, but fame is a fickle bitch. What was so fresh and new two seasons back is often but a distant memory to the twelve year olds and asexual shut-ins who hang on Idol's every ingenue. I just wish Anoop would a write a book about his post Idol experience. Contractually, he probably can't - but dude's got some sober-eyed observations on what it's like to step OFF that global merry-go-round. Me? I'd be holed-up in some bad hotel lounge reminding anyone who would listen just who the hell I used to be. Not Anoop. He's got too much savvy, class and talent to go that route. Look for his music soon. Hell, use the twenty you were saving for that Adam Lambert disc and buy from the one American Idol contestant on the planet who could explain the social implications of our state's urbanization without using all his fingers...

Speaking of fingers, I'd just wrapped mine around a most righteous hamburger when I got my next assignment of the day: Babysit the plane crash. Okay, that's not a direct quote, but you get the idea. Some eighteen hours earlier, a small plane had crashed into a High Point neighborhood, killing the pilot and a passenger. Tragic, yes and big news to boot. Before neighbors could even grasp what had happened, a squadron of photogs, reporters and even a few management types were assembling on scene. I myself was lucky enough to miss it, as other duties pulled me out of pocket. But a debris field waits for everyone. Which is why, a full day after impact, The Suits dispatched me post-haste. It was not my first plane crash scene and most probably not my last. But unlike other crash locales, this one was occurred in a neighborhood much like my own. Trees clipped in descending order, fuselage wedged in a house, intact engine sitting in the street...let's just say you had to be there. And the media WAS there - print, TV, even a radio reporter or four. By five o clock, we'd gathered in a semi-circle, each crew vying for an unobstructed view of the destruction. Did we stop to gawk at the plane parts, wax emphatically on the frailty of life, vow to never board a stump-jumper again? Not really. We were all on deadline, you see. We were far more concerned with editing, audio and IFB. The fact that the backdrop was a debris field was sad, but not particularly distracting. If that makes me a jackal, well, you know where to send Animal Control.

Now, about that irony. Honestly, there is none. Interviewing a pop-star wannabe in the morning and shooting a fatal crash in the afternoon is about as unique as that burger I barely finished. Or maybe I've just become numb to the vagaries of the chase. Do anything for long enough and it becomes the norm - be it looking at life through a tube or feeling compelled to write about it (most) every night.

Now if you'll excuse me, there's a beveled reflection I must avoid...

Tools on Parade

While no fan of live trucks myself, I can't imagine scrambling up the side of one as three thousand of my closest friends chant the initials of a university I couldn't get into. Speaking of which, should YOU ever find yourself preening over a boozy mob like some shirtless King of Sop, do take a moment to review your goals in life - if not your immediate fashion choices. Apparently, no one in Richmond stopped to think of anything after VCU's unlikely rise in the Final Four sent a street full of Virginian's into an O.J. like frenzy. Okay, so no one lost their head - but dignity did die a thousand deaths as a band of jabronies decided to summit a WRIC live truck. Much bad dancing followed. Somehow, this arrhythmic act sated the crowd, providing irrefutable proof of their team's round-ball dominance. Ooooo-kay. Just be careful with your flash mob, there. You might break into a halfway decent moonwalk only to have some portly schlub in a utility vest reach up and slice your Achilles tendon with his rusty Leatherman. I'm not saying it's right, only that there's enough suppressed rage behind the wheel of the average rolling billboard to erase an entire city block full of athletic supporters. Remember, Sports fans...

...that ain't no ice cream truck.

Except the Camera Guy...

Rust Never Bleeps

Bill didn't care what their little jazz trio was called, Stephanie's cousins WEREN'T gonna follow them around all day!

Okay, so they're not Stephanie's cousins, but Wally West, Matt Kendrick and Wiley Porter can come to my family reunion any day, since they chew with their mouths closed AND play kick-ass Jazz. I tell ya, between the (incredible) Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings concert I went to Saturday night and running into Wally today, I'm beginning to realize what a fan of brass instruments I am. This in itself is strange, as I grew up the younger brother an amateur trumpet player. I'm not saying it scarred me, but to this day the faintest whiff of a Herb Alpert solo makes me lunge for something grungy. I find early Soundgarden to be a suitable antidote. But this post ain't about music.

It's about serendipity.

That's what I felt when I schlepped my gear into the VIP tent this morning. All the way over I'd been grumbling to the News Gods about what a cliche they'd created with the groundbreaking. Really, the products of those staged affairs may make for great lobby tchotchke, but as television they rank right below ride-alongs with the Amish vice squad. Actually, THAT would make for pretty interesting Tee-Vee, but a gathering of suits and golden shovels? It's enough to make you want to leave the fancy camera in the car and record the damn thing door to door with an Etch-A-Sketch. The prolonged podium gloating, the endless acknowledgements, the high-gloss hardhats -- it's a presentation I've slept through a thousand times before. There's only ONE thing that could make a scene like that worse...

Rain.

Which is exactly what I awoke to, a mere eighty minutes before the speaker was scheduled to begin recognizing every single elected official in the crowd. I could just hear the predictable patter as I watched a woodchuck float past my bedroom window on an upturned Frisbee. %&$@%! With my luck, they probably wouldn't even rent a tent! How wrong I was. Not only did the hospital spring for a tent to announce their expansion in, they hired the official sax player of this very website to chase away the doldrums. Wally even stopped playing long enough to give a salute when I walked in. How cool was that? Almost enough to make up for the fact that all that jazz drowned out most of my soundbites. Still, it served as a musical reminder that life doesn't always suck the way we think it should.

That, or it's better to burn out than to fade away. I'm never sure...

All the World's a White-Balance

It's about as sexy as changing the batteries in your smoke detector, but skip it just once and your whole day could go up in flames. I'm talking about the lowly white-balance, that in-camera calibration that separates the cameramen from the fan-boys. Sometimes a push-button, but most often a toggle, this seminal switch can unmake your day faster than a traffic reporter hopped-up on fender-benders. Ahem...let's review the science. Embedded deep within each and every fancycam is some metallic doohickey that can't judge color for shit. Thus, a persoanl asist of sorts is needed each and every time you fire that puppy up. It's easy: just find something white in the room/submarine/typoon you're shooting in and point the camera at it. Press another button and the camera shuffles through color cards from the mini-series ROOTS before finally deciding precisely what white is. Seconds later you're own your way, smug with the knowledge that your fancycam damn well knows the difference between taupe, puce and of course, magenta. As such, all colors will properly stick to the tape, all will be jake and at no time will the Smurf word be used... Until you wander into another room/submarine/typhoon, at which point you have to start the whole needlesome process all over again. Got it? Good!

I'm happy we've had this time together. Ya know, other than just running my mouth non-stop, I really want to establish the Lenslinger Institute as a place of higher learning, where photog fashion and camera-mannerisms can be studied by shell-shocked survivors of the Fourth Estate. I just hope I wasn't too technical. I mean, sure, I could delve into coor-temperatures and the Kelvin scale, I could prattle for endlessly about where to white-balance in brackish light. I could even devise some sort of miniature flow chart that young news shooters could stuff into their cargo shorts pockets, you know, the ones filled with dead Double-AA batteries, Cheeto dust and travel bottles of AXE body spray. But what good would that do? A new photog has to repeat every error in the book at least twice before he or she remembers to search endlessly for spare square inches of hue-free real estate. It's more than a technical setting - it's a rite of passage! Why, I remember the first time I white-balanced on a passing albatross. The sea was angry that day, my friend...