Business Cards

Almost anyone in any type of job collects business cards to keep up with their contacts, but when you're in the TV business the collection of business cards can grow to be quite diverse and interesting.



A lot of my cards are Police, Fire, EMS cards. This was one of the various models of Sheriff Gerald K. Hege cards.



There are also lots of Laywers, politicians, government officials and a plethera of tow truck companies.



Some of my favorite cards are from the local NASCAR teams.



And the collection wouldn't be complete without a ton of cards from other TV reporters and photogs that I have run into or worked with over the past 13 years.



I met Jim Cantore at a NASCAR Race a couple of years ago.



Another staple business card is the 'free food' card and the 'buy 5 get one free' card.



And cards to get us back to great places to eat. (interesting opaque plastic card.)



This card is for that one day that me and some deputy get into a pissing match....



That's on the back of this.....



I also have cards from a familiar blogging buddy....



Some of my card collection goes back to the mid to late eighties when I was just a kid. This one is my parents 'Show' card from their country music singing days.



Most of the cards I collect get deposited onto my computer desk until I take the time to insert them into the card holding book.

I haven't kept up with getting the cards inserted into the book lately.

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.