Pictures Don't Lie, Do They?

Flirtatious: You ought to be in pictures.

Real Mood? Reflectively refreshed.

Prediction: Lance Armstrong will not win le Tour du France next year.  Now on yesterday's predictions. I took some risks I want you to know, and I'm not out of the woods yet. I did accurately predict Lance would win this year.  But did you see him almost fall down?  It could have happened. On the other prediction I'm still hanging. I've been eating apples with Australian stickers on them since April. That's why I thought I was safe predicting a good harvest in 2005. They've already had it.  But I couldn't find any numbers on that harvest any where. I'm still looking.  I did discover that Australia is one of the top producers of the Custard Apple. I'm going to want a non-Aussie recommendation before I bite into something that just doesn't sound like it should exist.  Remember these are the same people who eat vegemite.

What a different day. After breakfast we popped by the photo store and Best Buy and spent some more money we didn't have. It was all because I'm getting ambitious and semi-serious about this photography thing. And the more I thought about it in that reflection, the more I remember with fondness my photo journalist friends.

One of my favorite photographer stories to tell students took place back when Federico Pena was the Mayor of this City. He was going to be flying out of Stapleton to Washington D.C.   Andy Schaeffer (the PJ) and I were sent late, to get video of the Mayor, and at least 45 seconds of cover video of  his Continental 737  taxiing away from the gate.

We got there just in time to shoot him walking onto the jetway, and then Andy raced back to see if he could get an angle on the jet backing out. He could, but he really didn't like the lighting and the sequence he was getting..  He was visibly  frustrated. Frustrated enough that a woman watching him, and waiting for another flight, looked out the window and offered, "hey, why don't you shoot this plane over here? It looks just like the one the mayor got on?"

Up to that point I'd seen Andy enthusiastic and  excited about his work,  but never angry. This poor lady, who I think meant well, caught Mr. Schaeffer off guard and boy did he get in her face.

It's been too many years to give you his speech verbatim, but I'll never forget the context. You can trust this paraphrased rendition.

"That's just what you people think we do, isn't it?  You think we fake it. You think we don't care about being accurate and honest about what we're shooting. Well you're wrong. The plane your looking at is not the one the mayor is on.  And so if we're talking about the mayor's plane on TV tonight?  You'll see the mayor's plane or no plane at all. Is that clear?"  

The poor woman just shrunk into her seat and said nothing more.  I'd like to think that most photo journalists still have Andy's code of ethics. MOST is about all you can ever hope for.  You'll often hear seasoned journalists mumble, "this was a lot cleaner business 20, 30 years ago than it is now."

They've just lost some of their memory cells.  I can remember watching a TV reporter and "PJ" back in the 70's working on a piece on violent guard dogs in junk yards. They were having a heck of a time getting a German Shepherd to bark at them  through a fence. I don't know whose idea it was, but in search of good video the photographer set up his shot on his tripod, while the reporter climbed to the top of a fence and began throwing rocks at the dog to get the beast riled up.  I was working in radio at the time, and I had to work in TV for a few years before I got over that first impression.

The technology today must really make it tough for all photographers operating in a bind. With a Photo Shop program on hand the print guys have miraculous opportunities to turn fiction into fact.  Back in April of '97 a despondent Air Force Captain Craig Button crashed his A-10 fighter jet in the mountains.  When he went missing out of Arizona he had these huge live bombs on board. They found his plane and his body fairly quickly, but to this day no one knows what happened to those bombs. The National and Local media converged on the search command post and stayed for more than a month hoping the bombs would turn up.  To give we reporters and photographers some idea of the mission, they brought in a dummy 500 pound bomb to show us what they were looking for. 

Well, after several days of searching, the military arranged for photographers to take chopper rides up to the crash site where the searching was continuing.  All the photographers  came back with shots of searchers climbing around on rocks.  They all had pictures, still and moving, of helicopters landing and taking off.. But as I was walking past an AP photographer banging away on his laptop I looked down and saw this 500 pound bomb sticking up out of the rock pile?

 Talk about your exclusive.

"How in the ____did get that shot?," I screamed.

The photographer just shrugged his shoulders and then a slow grin appeared.  He had just superimposed the dummy bomb on to one of his search photos, and man did it look real. He got me good, and you can feel good that he didn't push one little button on his laptop that would have sent his creativity all over the World.  Then he would have gotten us ALL  really good.

Bottom line here is that I promise to let you know, at least by the tail end of any entry, whether or not I've been photographically messsing with you. And for what it's worth? In all my years of working in TV, more than 95 percent of the photographers I worked with would have chewed that poor lady at Stapleton out.