Exclusive Video???

What constitutes exclusive video?

Is exclusive video when only one camera captures the video of an event even if the event may happen two different times at two different places?



This Video from the Winston Salem Journal Website of Jerry Wilson at the scene of his capture and arrest for shooting the Stokes County Deputy on Thursday was a Fox 8 exclusive for a period of time because when it happened, our camera was the only camera at that scene.( I didn't shoot it.)



But over at WXII they claim to have EXCLUSIVE VIDEO of Wilson too! True, no other crews were at the courthouse when Wilson arrived there in the backseat of a patrol cruiser in handcuffs, but essentially the same video was already taken at the SCENE OF THE ARREST, making neither piece exclusive after this point.


What do YOU think?

On the Hunt

After severly neglecting the blog for the past two weeks for a variety of reasons, from a bad head cold, to Christmas shopping, to sheer madness around the house and really nothing of pressing interest to blog about, I will now attempt to jump back on the blog wagon.

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Monday a week ago now, I found myself 6 days into a 12 day vacation (counting Sats and Suns) siiting quietly and as still as is possible in a tree stand 15 feet above ground level, waiting for that elusive 8-point-buck or his mate (you know her as doe, a deer, a female deer...) to cross my path.



The Sunday night before that I had ridden shotgun to the farther reaches of Stanly County with my neighbor David so that we could hit the hay earlier than I would ever think about bedtime, and rise from our slumber well before the sun did.

After a dark trek through the woods and about a 30-minute wait under the moon, itwas legal to shoot. David didn't waste any time. 30-minutes into legal hunting hours, just as the sun was peeking over the horizon, he popped off a round into the not so dark. A large buck had crossed into his line of sight, behind a tree and then emerged clear killing position.



POW!!!! I nearly jumped out of my perch above the forest floor, the .30 caliber round piercing the morning silence.

David crackled across our 2-way radios to his brother in another nearby tree stand, quickly relaying that he saw a bigun'.

He saw the deer leap into the air, spin around and run off, surely to die somewhere nearby. David and his brother Chip climbed down from their platforms to look for the doomed animal. I stayed put hoping they'd run some deer my way.



No such luck, for me or David. Seems in his haste to take the shot, he may have missed. (And Chip's not letting him live it down!) They couldn't find any trace of hair or blood in the area where the deer was shot. They wandered all through the woods for about a half hour before we gave up and went back to the house for breakfast.

There were no more deer sightings for the rest of the day.

Fast forward 1-week to December 26th.... two Davidson County hunters, an uncle and a nephew, were sitting in their deer stands with no deer to be seen. It was the nephew's birthday so near quitting time the uncle climbed out of his hunting perch to walk the woods in hopes of scaring up a birthday present for his nephew.

As he walked through the woods he caught a glimpse of some rumbling in the brush and greed must have come over him because he didn't wait for his nephew to take the shot. As the movement in the woods just out of his sight continued, the uncle took aim on what he thought might be a bigun'.

POW!!!

Screams came from downrange. His nephew, also trying to scare up some deer, was the source of the movement the uncle noticed in the brush.

Neither hunter had on the blaze orange hat or vest required by NC Law, and so neither hunter knew the other was walking in the woods.



I heard the EMS response to this event on my scanner radios and it became my story on my first day back at work.

The nephew was shot in the hip and was last reported to be in critical but stable condition in an area hospital.

We were Live at Noon, 5 and 6 with the story of why hunters should always where there blaze orange!

1 Year Later - The birth of a Blog

I went to bed last night(Wednesday) and realized that Tuesday was my 1-year blogiversary.



It's been a whole year (Dec 20th) since I started TV Photog Blog at the insistence from Lenslinger that this blog thing was going to be big. I hadn't really paid much attention to blogs before that, but boy have I this year.



I would say that this phenomenon along with other technology can be likened to the beginning of the 20th century. In the early 1900s Ford was perfecting the horseless carriage, the Wright's were trying to take to the air and a lot of people thought they were crazy and that these contraptions would fade away. But look where we are today.



The world is a changin' and blogs are the new airplane. There's really no telling what these silly online diatribes will look like in 5, 10, or even 20 years, but much like the Wright Brothers, or Henry Ford, I have hope that it's going to be big, and I think that eventually it will affect 100 percent of the population in some way or another. And to an extent that is already happening with blogs beginning to play a part in news coverage on local and national levels.



As for me, in the annual year of my blog I've accomplished a whole lot that I am proud of.

I have received NPPA awards for 2 of my stories, I was recently nominated for 2 Emmy Awards and I have been able to produce some truly amazing stories all year long.



I am also very fortunate to be able to have Stewart 'Lenslinger' Pittman as a friend and co-worker. Even though we grew up in the same neck of the woods, living within miles of each other, we only met when covering news in the mid-90s for separate stations. But in the past year we have worked together to perfect our blogging (though his writing is 100 times what mine could ever be), talking through ideas and working out technical issues(that's where I come in to offset his writing advantage).



And I have met a bunch of great people through the blog. A lot of them I have only contacted online, but look forward to in person meetups one day.

I was fortunate to meet the lovely Amanda Congdon of Rocketboom at Converge South in October.



And back in May I got to know some of the Greensboro area bloggers at the monthly Wednesday night meetup.(Wenesdays are always booked for me or I'd go to all the meetups)



I've taken a ton of pictures in the year, at first with my cell phone, but in March I dropped a couple of bucks on a nice digital camera and that really lit the blog up.



So I leave you with some thumbnails of some of my favorite TVPhotogBlog pictures.










You can see more TV Photog Blog Pictures on Flickr.

Lost and Found

With my vacation for Christmas impending, with just one more day of labor to go before turning in Unit 15 for 12 days, I figured the least I could do would be clean the thing out.

And as Lenslinger has chronicled on his blog, it turned into an adventure in lost and found for this "Photogifus Hoardicus", as he puts it.



The fishing poles in the picture were stashed there after a camping trip where no fishing even occurred. I also found plenty of EMPTY XDCam cases, 2 rain jackets, my sun reflector, my camera rain cover, and a bunch of dead AA batteries, 4 pair of Mechanix Wear Gloves, a can of bug reppellant, Timberland boots, rubber knee high waterproof boots, my press placard, an old NASCAR Credential, a fanny pack, a backpack, two, 3-year-old phonebooks, 200 business cards, 5 aluminum soda cans, 8 Krystal burger boxes, 5 dixie cups, 6 baseball hats, 6 basketballs, a bag of leftover lunch, Laptop Computer, an electronic organizer, 2 pair of sunglasses, poncho, cell phone charger, 2 AC/DC power inverters, a big stick, 4 polo shirts, my winter gloves, and several Beta SP and SX tapes.



This little guy found his way onto my back bumper today while I was parked at PTI Airport. I swear he wasn't on the bumper when I arrived at the airport because when I finished my assignment I found him in the way of opening the rear gate. He's mine now.

I dug deep under the seats and reloaded my map collection that had spilled out of the basket that is has become the new map home. The 4 year old Betacam SP box was retired recently after it finally gave up at the corners.



I've never even shot on SX and not on SP in more than a year and tapes are still ending up in my mobile office.



The basketballs are a leftover from basketball practice with my team. But it's only been a couple of weeks since another photog and I tossed the Sat Truck football around while waiting for a liveshot, so I can only hope to use the basketball on any given day of news boredom.



Still, I threw a bunch of stuff away, filling up a nearly empty 30 gallon trash can with old papers and such. The truck is still cluttered, but it's a start.

My Basketball Team - VIDEO

The basketball season has started and with 2 games down, my Hasty Braves are 2 and 0. I am somewhat surprised at the result, this being my first time coaching a sport, muchless basketball.

Our first game was on December 3, and we won against a team from Wallburg that I thought would be really tough. We jumped out to a 19 to 4 early lead, but they pulled to within 5 in the middle of the game. That had me a little worried but we pulled off the win by 8 points.



On Saturday we played a Fairgrove team that I kind of knew wouldn't pose too much of a challenge, but what I didn't know is how great my boys would play.



They played like a team and 5 of my 8 players made baskets. As a matter of fact, the minimum scoring boy who did score was 6 points. We won 56 to 6.



Click here to see 2 minutes of video highlights of that game.

Our next game isn't until after the Christmas break and we face a really tough team from Lexington.

My Magazines and the Mail!!!!!

I told in a previous posting about receiving my News Photographer Magazines severely torn up.

In the past 6 months I have received my News Photographer Magazine looking like this.....



and this...



Both of these are ripped and torn about 10 pages deep!

On Friday I received my November issue in OK shape but on DECEMBER 2ND?! It didn't really concern me until I dug into it and there was information pertenent to the month of November that I would have like to known....in November!

In the previous cases I ended up just letting it go.

But now that I think about it, with the November issue being so late, I don't think that's even the extent of it.

I counted up all the 2005 News Photographer Magazines that I had in the house and only found 6. So not only are these magazines torn up and late, some of them haven't even made it here at all!

So last night I sent an email to the publisher of the magazine and got a response in a matter of minutes...AFTER HOURS!!! He gave me another email address to send a note to so that I can get all my missing and damaged magazines replaced. And he definately wants me to follow up with the postmaster.

My Christmas Tree!

My wife and I went and bought a Christmas Tree Thursday night and it's the biggest darned Frazier Fir I've ever spent good money on.

Usually we head over to the nearest Lowes and pick up a tree for their coporate, mass produced prices, but my wife saw a tree lot just a mile from the house with nice fat trees and so we saved the extra 10 miles or so on the round trip and plopped down a little extra on the private lot tree.



It looked really big on the lot but it wasn't until I squeezed it through the front door that I realized just how tall and fat this sucker really is.

In the stand, which only adds a half inch, it was too tall for our 8 foot ceilings so I lopped off about two inches at the top.



We stuck it in the corner and pushed all of the furniture back into place and the wife and my little step daughter tricked it out with all of our decorations on Friday afternoon.



And those presents under the tree are apparently for me, from the wife. I think I need to go shopping!

Is That Thing Heavy?

The title of this post is the single most ask question every Television Photographer must deal with on an almost daily basis, well, exept at VJ Stations where they are carrying sissycams, I mean Handycams.

But now the popular query is the title of another TV Photog's Blog. (and she uses a real TV Camera!)



Angie Moriconi is a photojournalist in Miami Florida who and she uses her name as her URL now, but her actual blogspot address is interestingly creative.

Check out what this award winning TV Photojournalist is writing about and taking pictures of at www.angiemoriconi.com.

Mighty White Oak

I literally when out on a limb today for my job.



I had the opportunity to climb into a 250 year old, grandaddy of a White Oak tree today and Greensboro and it was thrilling.



Sure you've heard of Rock Climbing, but have you ever heard about Tree Climbing? I mean after you turned 10 and didn't climb the dogwood in grandma's backyard.



Recreational Tree Climbing is a relatively new hobby/sport started in 1985 when an arborist took a group of people on a tree climbing expedition at their request.



Much like rock climbing there are ropes, carabiners and harnesses, but unlike finding a bit of rock to grab onto and climb, using on the rope as a safety device, in tree climbing the rope is the climbing and safety device.



As I climbed 20 or so feet into the mighty Oak with Tobe Sherrill of Sherrill's Tree Climbing and Supply, I learned everything I could about Recreational Tree Climbing in 2 short hours, all while gathering all the footage onto my XDCam and my personal DVCam.



I was able to get pretty comfortable standing on the limb and even stepped off a time or two and swung around and then stepped back up onto my perch.

According to Tobe, trees like these are the best kind to climb because of the long spanning architecture of the oak's massive canopy.



Tobe Sherrill has climbed huge Redwoods in California and Spruce's in Washington, I've climbed this Oak, and the dogwood in my Grandma's backyard when I was 7,8 and 9.

Sherrill says despite the massive size of those supersized west coast trees, some of the best trees for climbing are right here in Greensboro, NC.

I feel priveledged.