Countdown to Vegas

Like a couple of wooden Indians, Weaver and I have been spotted on the loading dock lately, rendered utterly agog by our fancy-schmancy passes to NAB. What is NAB, you ask? Only the world's largest electronic media show, a 5 day city-state of TV geeks, evil geniuses and cyber-nerds of every description, held every year in squeaky clean Las Vegas. This time Chris Weaver, Brad Ingram and I will be among the 100 thousand some in attendance. While we're there, we'll launch a hard target search for the latest in technology, the scariest convention-goers, the most righteous freebie, plus a slow drizzle of adult beverages and casino peanuts. Look for all the ugly details to splay out on our respective blogs, and be sure to check out b-roll.net, where we'll post a series of mostly-in-focus video segments from the jam-packed floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Along the way, Weaver and I hope to hook up with the always entertaining JL Watkins of Little Lost Robot fame, before crashing the scene at the tenth anniversary B-roll Bash. Of course Brad Ingram is also making the trip, but judging from this picture, the NPPA Region 6 director has his own ideas about killing time in Vegas. Stay tuned for details...

Walk-downs, Round-Ups and Ride-Alongs

I don’t chase too many squad cars these days, but there was a time when my sole journalistic focus was that of the crime and grime variety. Homicides, bank robberies, stand-offs and drive-bys; grisly scenarios that played out with great regularity in the housing projects and trailer courts of Eastern Carolina. Despite its small size, it was a highly competitive TV news market brimming with rookie news crews and enough steady downtrodden suffering to keep their dilapidated live trucks crisscrossing the region at break neck speed. With a growing Rolodex of weary detectives, ghetto preachers and assorted kingpins, I feasted on the underbelly of the evening news until eventually I grew full. These days I follow a rather mellow beat but not so in the beginning. As a result, memories of my early twenties play out like one long, black and white episode of COPS.

Walk-downs

In an area where TV stations lived and died by the police blotter, the walk-down was king . Every night, the cops paraded a new defendant through the region's living rooms, but only after they marched through my lens. Back-pedaling with a face full of viewfinder, I learned to navigate every pebble of the Detective Building’s gravel parking lot as shackled strangers cursed my camera or most often, hung their heads in blame . To astute viewers it was little more than cop-shop filler. But to my buddies and me, every walk-down was an athletic event and we threw out our shoulders and contorted our souls to document them in proper cinematic style. From low slung 'Darth Vader entrance' shots to the extreme tights of the suspect's eyes to the obligatory cuffed-hands close-up, my pals and I learned to bag a dozen different shots in the half as many yards between the idling police car and the battered back entrance of the Detective's Building. When the cops really want their bad guy to make the news, they's park as far away from the door as possible, giving me and lenslinging hoods plenty of time to swarm. Many a newscast opened with footage from that very lot and the slow-motion highlights still loop endlessly in the edit bay in my head. I suppose therapy would help.

Round-Ups

But who needs an overpriced analyst when I can pour it all out to you good people? Don't answer that, just keep your eyeballs moving and we'll get through this. Next, I wanna talk about round-ups, that time honored tradition of following law enforcers as they serve warrants based on all those proverbial 'six month investigations'. Operation: Street Sweep, Code Name: Fishnet, the cops always came up with some loopy name for their planned apprehension of street level drug dealers. I didn't care what they called it; I was just stoked to be along for the ride (in the front seat, no less!). I remember hiding behind scraggly trees as beefy undercover detectives who didn't want to be on TV banged on trailer doors in the middle of my viewfinder. I recall squinting through a lens at a groggy crackhead as he blinked repeatedly at the men in blue windbreakers standing over his head. Looking over at me, he gave an acknowledging nod, much like he would if we'd passed each other outside a convenience store. And I remember the prison yard death stares of countless shackled strangers as men in clip-on ties and flattop haircuts high-fived each other around them. Good times.

Ride-Alongs

But my interaction with the PO-lice wasn't always on foot. I've ridden shotgun in more marked cars than some rookie cops. Sometimes I've tagged along with a particular officer just to get footage of him or her behind the wheel, but the fun doesn't usually start until I join them for patrol. Seatbelt enforcement, impaired driver watch, speed limit crackdown; I've tagged along with Johnny Law on almost every kind of mission there is. Not only did it throw my shoulder out of whack but it changed the way I drive. Take speeding for example. I used to race fifteen miles over the posted limit no matter where I was going, but finally the ride-alongs (and expensive tickets) finally slowed me down. Why? Karma, baby. Hovering over a police officer as they issue some poor schlub a citation isn't just awkward, it's wrong. God knows the last thing I want to see when I'm diggin' my liscense out of my wallet is some loser with a lens pushin' in for a better shot of the veins bulging on my forehead. No, with my luck, Geraldo Rivera himself would pop out of the squad car and demand to know why my sordid floorboard is the gore-splattered bone-yard of a thousand doomed ketchup packets.

Maybe I don't miss working the cop-shop beat after all.

Kiggins Takes Atlanta

Nothing livens up an achingly dull press conference like a buddy with a zoom lens and sense of humor. Steve Kiggins has both. I should know, having held impromptu rendezvous with the jolly photog for a couple of years now. Ribbon-cuttings, house fires, student protests; Steve and I have chatted at many an ill-timed incident. Now the burgeoning journeyman is taking his eye and enthusiasm to CBS 46 in Atlanta, where he'll no doubt find the faster pace of newsgathering he's looking for. I meanwhile, will remain in mid-market squalor, where I'll no doubt miss the wit and wisdom of one Steve Kiggins the next time I'm stranded at an all day train wreck. Just be careful, Steve. Atlanta's a long way from Reno.

How to be a Photog (in 3 Easy Steps)

Aim Like a Sniper

We TV news cameramen (and women) pride ourselves on our aim, our eyesight, our stark acknowledgement of the otherwise unnoticed. Be it a hostile crime scene or a crowded farmer’s market, we train our vision on the periphery and bag points of view like hunting trophies. But we don’t draw blood; we draw interest. Though they rarely ever think about it, all those slobs on the couch watch the world through the crosshairs of a master craftsman. Unless I’m having an off-day, of course. Then they’re lucky if the pictures ain’t all shaky and blue.

Drive Like a Fireman

Okay, we don’t save lives or property. We merely fill in the black between commercials. But to ask a young scanner-geek to drive cautiously to a breaking news scene is like asking a drunk to take it easy on the sauce. I alone have surpassed speed limits by twenty miles per hour just so I wouldn’t have to fight for a spot at a Rotarian luncheon. Of course time and the approach of a middle age have a way of easing the lead foot syndrome. God knows I don’t jump curbs to get to ribbon-cuttings anymore. But if there’s a smoldering bus wreck on the horizon, I still reserve the right to hog the breakdown lane for miles at a stretch.

Dress Like a Tourist

Amid all the high speed pursuits and press conference cat-napping, we photogs like to keep it casual I’m not sure why, exactly. Certainly the humble task of lugging and deploying clumsy TV gear requires a certain utilitarian approach, but we shooters take it to another level. Tropical shirts, hiking boots, trousers with a criminal amount of pockets - we can’t get enough of them. Perhaps we’re just trying to compensate for the sartorial splendor of our overdressed, on-air partners. After all, what looks more natural than a reporter going live from a burning cornfield in a magnificently tailored suit? No, those of us behind the lens are just trying to keep it real. Me personally, I’m just channeling my inner Magnum P.I.

Drenching the Interloper

Be it a puffed up rent-a-cop or a pissed-off homeowner, people ain't breakin' out the welcome wagon quite like they used to. Just ask WFTV reporter Leland Vittert, whose sculpted hair-do was recently saturated with tap water in the line of duty. Seems the lady behind the door didn’t wanna play ball with the newsmaker, so she flung a pitcher of water his way and bestowed him with internet immortality in the process. Surely there’s more to the story, but then again, hostile receptions are all part of the gig when you’re (under)paid to pierce the heart of darkness...or stir up some smack for the evening news - whichever be the case. I just hate when my camera and I get dragged into it.

Early in my career, I rushed lens-up into a corner garage with a female reporter who was bent on avenging her roommate’s botched fuel pump replacement. It got dumb quick. As she hissed accusations at the towering mechanic in my viewfinder, I got the distinct feeling my partner didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. What followed was a bowing up of the redneck variety, one in which thick-necked grease monkeys in Nascar t-shirts poured out of the back and into our face. Seconds later, the front door slammed open as the in-house pit crew escorted the little reporter lady and her dopey cameraman out of the garage and across the gravel parking lot. Back in the news car, heated words were exchanged between members of the media. I never did get to the bottom of the whole fuel pump debacle, but I did learn a powerful lesson that day. Only fools rush in.

Then there was the time I was in an outlying county on a drug round-up when the deputies led the scariest hillbilly family by in handcuffs. Most freaky was the family matriarch - a beady-eyed little granny facing crack-trafficking charges, who glared angrily into my lens as she filed past in shackles. Hoping she hadn't already vexed me with some kind of backwoods outhouse voodoo, I positioned myself to get a better shot of her and her clan as they made their return trip. When Grandma CrackPipe saw me lying in wait, she nudged her oversized nephew, a lumbering giant who seemed to be missing a few fairly important chromosomes. Still, he had enough of his D.N.A. strand intact to dig deep and come up with the biggest, nastiest loogie ever captured on videotape. When he passed back by my position he let it fly - and the lethal concoction of snot, Mountain Dew and tobacco juice warbled in slow-motion right for me. Mercifully, the inbred saliva projectile fell just short of full-contact splashdown and only a little spittle struck the very center of my lens. Instinctively, I racked focus to highlight the hillbilly spit running down my camera's eye. Later, we ran that shot on-air so much the machine’s spinning heads stretched the tape.

One of the more memorable front porch encounters happened just a few years ago to a couple of friends of mine. Tara Defrancesco, a tall, well-accessorized reporter who’s since left the business, was turning a story on a local firefighter accused of embezzlement. In what’s become as common practice, photojournalist Kenny D set up his camera on a tripod across the street while Tara climbed the firefighter’s porch, wireless microphone in hand. Sheepishly at first, the firefighter came to the door to see what the familiar face from the evening news could possibly want with an innocent public servant like himself. As Tara explained she was hoping for an interview, the firefighter stepped out onto hs porch. Across the street, Kenny D leaned into his viewfinder and looked for the red light that told him he was indeed recording the still civil scene.

That’s when the firefighter's wife burst out of the front door and in a finishing move worthy of professional wrestler, pushed Tara to the ground. To her credit, Tara regained her high-heel balance, retained her composure and strolled back to Kenny and his camera, half-grinning in bewilderment all the way. Of course we had great fun with that piece of tape back at the shop. It aired repeatedly, made the wife and firefighter look like the white trash they were and prompted me to almost send Jeff Foxworthy an addendum to his trademark schtick:

"If you’ve ever pushed down the nice reporter lady ’cause your husband’s sticky fingers got him on the evening news, you might be a redneck."

The Pissy and the Bellicose

Meet the TV news photog's natural enemy: the shopping mall security guard. Though usually found shooing Goth kids out of the food court, this breed of law enforcement flunkie becomes especially agitated in the presence of zoom lenses. Take Smokey the Bear here. He and his uniformed goons are currently starring in a most entertaining web video, in which they wrongfully harangue a Providence Rhode Island TV news crew who are simply trying to do their job. Not only do these particular rent-a-dicks repeatedly order the camera crew off public property, they make the spectacularly bad decision to threaten the crew in question with physical harm and even death! All this, because they didn't want to see one of their security vehicles dangling off a parking deck ledge on the six o clock news. don't these guys have a Baby Gap to stake out or something?

Though this case is a bit extreme, getting hassled by a rental authority is a familiar occurence to anyone who chases scanner traffic for very long. The phenomenon us especially pronounced at shopping malls, where a passing flash of a logo'd lens can draw a half dozen thugs in matching polyester. For all their attempts at an authoritative vibe, these cats rarely know the law. To them, every walkway within five square miles of their employer's property is off limits to the Fourth Estate - unless of course there's an Easter Egg Hunt or other promotional event going on inside. Then, we lens-pushers are welcomed into Center Court with open arms and free flyers. Otherwise, it's all harsh words, puffed up chests and rude walkie-talkie gestures.

It's one of the reasons I grew so tired of spot news. I just have no desire to debate Freedom of the Press with someone sporting a mail-order badge and a few Skittles in their pockets. I'd just as soon argue Right of Way laws with volunteer firefighters in oversized turn-out gear. Both, make me late for lunch. But sometimes you just can't avoid an encounter with these cop-wannabes. All you can do is keep rolling, know your rights and understand that very often, the smaller the jurisdiction, the bigger the Napolean complex. Problem is many field crews know little of property laws. Worse yet, the stations that send them to the edge of calamity rarely back them up when things go stupid. And when you mix testosterone, television cameras and trumped-up hall-monitors, stupidity is virtually assured. So if you're a photog, educate yourself as to where you can and cannot be officially unwelcomed. And if you're the hiring guy at a fancy schmancy shopping mall, be sure to brief your security goobs on who not to harrass. You may also want to tell them those big shiny things the TV guys carry on their shoulders actually records things as they happen and can be replayed on-air and on-line over and over again. Seems they missed that memo as well...

Into the Wild

What better way to clear my head than a mid-morning traipse through North Carolina's newest state park? Well there has to be something better, but since Weaver beat me to the psycho rooster story, I didn't have much of a choice. Not that it mattered. I'm always up for exploring the many pockets of wilderness that dot the Piedmont - though I prefer to do so on the back of my mid-range mountain bike, not under the thud of an 18 pound fancy-cam. Still, it is my cross to bear, so I took to the woods in search of apostles. When none emerged from the shimmering distance, I settled for close-ups of spiders and such.

Long heralded as an environmental learning center of untapped potential, The Summit Conference Center boasts the kind of rolling topography I moved to the Piedmont for in the first place. Pristine wetlands, unfettered wildlife, a cascading network of root-infested trails - no wonder the wonks in Raleigh decided to make it Guilford County's first state park. It's already the site of family reunions, youth retreats and assorted feel-good gatherings. Now the well-kept secret is poised to becoming a statewide mecca for the tree-hugging set. All that's needed is a little publicity, something to let Sally Joe Housecoat know there's a slice of Eden right in their own backyard. That's where I come in.

When executive director Jonathan Frederick (who deserves his own reality show) suggested we walk through the park before I started shooting, I shrugged it off, grabbed my camera and followed him into the woods. A few minutes later I found myself in a love embrace with a fence post, sweating lightly and regretting the fact that my battered tripod was back in the car. Sure, a half-cocked shoulder-cam packs more swagger, but the pros know the power is in the sticks. That's why I was so eager to get back to Unit 4. No matter how I tried to slow my breathing, the flutter of the butterflies and the ripples of the creekwater were shirking the crosshairs of my heaving lens. After leaving the fence post my phone number, I shuffled uphill toward the car, all the while checking my person for splinters, ticks or any other embedded journalistic insects.

I'd tell ya what I found, but it's not that kind of blog. Get your mind out of the creek-bed, would ya?