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...

Down in a Hole

We were just outside Khaddaffi's hidey-hole when the laxatives kicked in... Okay, so that never happened but when you're humping gear under heavy deadline, you never know where you'll be forced to offload, er...upload. Which is why it's important to have a partner who can pull you up when you're stuck in the dumps. Take Charles Ewing - but don't think it'll be easy. Dude's a stone-cold prognosticator with a black belt in News-Fu. Sure, folks know him as their weekend weatherman, a genial bloke whose gravest hope is that you pack an extra pair of galoshes in your kid's lunch tomorrow. But come Monday, this mild-mannered meteorologist transforms into a tracked-package assassin, a cross-trained field operative who can break down a city council impasse in ninety seconds and tell you why it's gonna rain in five. That's a malleability I admire, which is why I never duck and cover when I see Chuck comin' with a crumpled piece of paper and a certain look in his eye. Many a morning he's dragged me out of the building and into some foolishness in the name of news. Does your weather guy do that?

Mine does, and though he might rather be holding down the green screen back at the shop, he's evolved into quite the safari partner. Why, just in our sporadic collaborations, we've drummed up conundrums, stared down rare scenarios and processed more oddities than most veteran detective teams. Call it a by-product of the grind, an accumulation of minutia so diverse it starts to wear away at your frontal lobe. Thus, my recall is less than total. I don't remember everything I shot last week, but I hold hazy frames of Charles in my head from half a decade back. There was the time we chased chatty hoarders around that Goodwill Store, posed as museum pieces at the Rosenblum Institute, turned day-old storm damage into breathless updates and fended off apoplectic residents of a most glowering inferno. Yes, the good Mr. Ewing and I have had many a misadventure and while this may read like some farewell piece, Charles and I ain't goin' anywhere. We're both fathers of two who count ourselves lucky to have a job we can rarely mail in. We may not chase down fire trucks unrequested, but when a subject matters gets in between us and our lunches, you'll not find a more focused predator than this brashly placid forecaster. Just don't mention the goldmine.

Glassing the Assassin

Hank Brown was there to spray the place, not witness a ripple in history. But that's exactly what he bagged on March 30, 1981, when a young John Hinckley reached down into a very dark place and pulled out a pistol. Brown was thirty two and a Vietnam vet the day ABC paid him to wait outside the Washington Hilton. He and the other lenslingers in attendance weren't expecting much more than a wave from the newly elected President. What they got was shot at immortality, though they couldn't have known then that the next few seconds would hiccup into infinity, looping back on itself forevermore on a distant invention called the web. When Hank Brown saw the bodies fall and the gunman crumple, he kept clear of his own trigger, letting the RECORD light shine in the corner of the screen as as chaos spilled onto the street. It wasn't easy...

"I had to keep telling myself, 'Hank, do your job. Keep rolling. If you do it, it will help ABC and the police..."

He was right. The evidence Brown (and others) provided helped a nation grasp the unimaginable and it set in motion the notion that America's fortieth President was made of more than flesh and bone. That's still being debated, but one thing's been certain for thirty years now. Hank Brown stepped up and stood history down. Will YOU be as ready?

Message Received...

For the moment I'm low on overblown prose, so let me extend a simple word of thanks and be done with my day. Last week, my youngest handed me a package she found on our front step. I was in a bit of a cleaning frenzy at the time and didn't give it much thought, but when I tore into it later I was delighted to find not a voodoo doll with a camera on it shoulder, but a brand new book I already hold dear. The second edition of Al Tompkins' Aim for the Heart, to be exact - a tome I loan to anyone smart enough to notice it on my desk in the newsroom. Last year in Vegas, I sought and received counsel from the man behind Al's Morning Meeting. He and Les Rose were more than generous with their time and I walked away with a head full of advice and a belly full of beer. Nearly a year later, I haven't forgotten that encounter. But neither have I acted on their shared wisdom of two men who populate a plane of existence of which I too aspire. Now this: a bound reminder of what determination can do, a talisman suitable for shelving. But I didn't just toss Al's book aside. I opened it and there I found a dare. Both naked praise and blunt instruction, its message was written in a language this simple news shooter can grasp: "Write YOUR damn book."

Heh. I feel as if I already have. And while it takes more than stream of consciousness to craft something someone wants to buy, I KNOW it's within my ability. That hasn't always been the case, as just ten years ago I was telling my wife how I wanted to take an evening college course in creative writing. Well, true to form I never made it to class, choosing instead to hammer out my yammerings and post them on-line; first on industry message boards and then on that emerging platform known as the blogosphere. Aside from wooing my wife and siring pretty kids, it was the best unconscious decision I ever made. Okay, so at no time was I bathed in ethereal light. I just followed an old friend's advice on writing: Put Ass. In Chair. That I did, night after night, until my alluring wife threatened to torch my computer if I didn't come to bed and get some perspective. My postings leveled off and my marriage improved. Now, I come to you from the deepest reaches of the Lenslinger Institute, a cameraman in full. All I really need are six extra hours a day, a focus honed from years of perfecting my stare and perhaps a tonic for my thinning hair.

Yes, nearly six years into this silly site, I'm no closer to writing a book than I was back when I was deciding if Lenslinger should have two esses. I went with one of course and never looked back. Doing so has enhanced my life in more ways than you can imagine. No real dollar signs have followed, mind you, but if appreciative e-mail were the coin of the realm, I've be swimming in the bucks like Scrooge McDuck. As it is, I'm still a man without an empire, but the stars seem to be aligning as of late and I'm increasingly convinced that where ever the hell this obsession is taking me, I haven't yet reached the end. Whew! I was beginning to think I'd peaked back when I was fawning over some dude named Daughtry. Turns out, I'm still gathering steam, though I do reserve the right to become derailed every so often. You'll know it when it happens: my output wanes as I cloak myself in melancholy. Hey, I think Shakespeare said it best: Shit Happens. Now if you'll excuse me, the bride says it's bedtime.

Some orders you don't ignore.