Sometimes going out, but I usually was there until nothing much was left to
provide any photographic drama.
When I started, the police/media mutual contempt society had not yet made its
way into western North Carolina. We took the official wreck photos for the NC
Highway Patrol. My first call-out was a Thursday night after the Monday I
started the job. Single vehicle fatality. Before I got to the scene itself, the
trooper (I still remember his name) took me aside, told me what to expect, and
asked if I thought I was up to it. Kinda nice, when you think of it—you’d
expect they’d have a pool on whether the new guy blew his cookies or not—but I
told him I was okay, that I’d been in the Army four years, and had probably
seen worse.
So I did the whole scene. Wide shots from an imaginary circle drawn around the
scene, then shots of skid marks, impact sites, various parts of the vehicle,
and then the driver, dead, hanging upside down from his lap belt. Again,
several angles. The staff photographer developed and printed two sets of
shots—one for the paper, and a more extensive set for the Highway Patrol.
Needless to say, we didn’t print the one of the body. I think what we did print
was a middle distance shot of the crumpled car, taken from a rear quarter,
framed so that readers could see the scene but the body itself was obscured by
twisted steel. There were a couple of other shots of the trooper and some of
the VFD guys doing their thing, and that was it.
We did that for several more years, and then one night the trooper had his own
camera and we didn’t do their shots anymore. We also had slightly tougher
access to the scenes, but things remained tolerable for almost all of my beat
time. When I left the paper, as one of the Lord High Mucky Mucks, cops and
reporters barely were speaking to one another. Information came from newly
created Public Information Officers. (Except for me, of course. <g> I still had
my relationships in place and any of the cops who were around when I was a
police reporter would talk to me. Well, _most_ of the time they’d talk to me.)
--Bob Whitmire
Certified Neanderthal
On Jul 15, 2014, at 10:40 AM, Ken Norton <ken@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Hey! Watch who you’re calling an old-timer! When I started on the police
>> beat as a cub reporter, I was issued a camera, told which settings to use,
>> and further instructed always to get a couple of set shots that included the
>> whole scene before getting all artsy. This offended my sensibilities until I
>> missed a decent set shot and had nothing but closeups for the editor to
>> choose from. My brain still rattles in my head when I think of it. <g>
>
> Oh, so you also failed to do the safety technique of backing out of
> the scene shooting wider as you leave? Set shots going in, set shots
> going out.
>
> Doesn't matter any more. Newspapers and television stations won't show
> anything but police lights flashing and the bumper of a firetruck.
>
> Case in point. A few days ago, there was a Beech Bonanza that landed
> gear-up. CNN was doing wall-to-wall live coverage of it. Except for
> the landing itself. They cut away to a prerecorded segment. Why? Just
> in case it crashed and burned. Way to crash and burn yourself CNN.
>
> Let's have more political stories, and whip people up in a frenzy over
> the Biebs egging his neighbor's house, but heaven forbid that you
> actually report the news.
--
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