behind the camera in pictures
A photog in San Francisco with a monochromatic Ampex VR 3000. The camera itself weighs 12 pounds, while the VTR backpack weighs in at 40 pounds and holds a mere 20 minutes of tape.
And it was touted as giving a video photog just as much flexibility as a film photog too…
Carroll Darringer of WMT-TV shoots sound-on-film as a “one man band” in the 1960s. One man banding in this era would being shooting your own sound instead of having a soundman tagging along.
The camera Darringer is using is a Frezzolini conversion of a Auricon Cine-Voice with a body brace that puts the weight of the camera out front. Later news film camera models would eventually put the camera up on the shoulder instead.
A photog shoots silent b-roll of a classroom of children drawing posters while a reporter looks on during the late 1960s.
A NBC crew shows off a portable electronic camera during the early 70s in Washington D. C.
The VTR is on the back of the staffer on the left, Percy Arrington in the center with the camera and a soundman on the right.
Looking at the Newseum’s database, four eight of the nineteen names I’ve sent in have been added as of Friday today. Still waiting to see who else gets approved. The names so far:
* James Pergola, photographer, Pathe News
* William Pitt, editor, Pathe News
* Charles Traube, photographer, Pathe News
* Allyn Alexander, photographer, Fox Movietone News
* Dan Prehus, photographer, KYW-TV
* Gary Brown, photographer, KREM-TV
* Mary Shore, reporter, KTVB-TV
* Dan Sullivan, photographer, KTVB-TV
And I’ve got another seven names of photographers I’ve found noted in passing in industry magazines I need to dig up more information on before I forward them…
George Gore, cameraman with NBC News, talks about covering the Greenlease kidnapping story in October of 1953.
One afternoon the Camel News Caravan editor of N.B.C. phoned and assigned me to film a story about one of the Greenlease kidnappers, who was still being hunted. He had last been seen by a grocery-store woman in Ohio.
I had only a couple hours to film this story and have it in Washington to be ready for the evening news release. I immediately phoned a flying service in Johnstown to have chartered plane ready. Before long we were flying over the city of Wheeling, West Virginia. I asked the pilot to circle over the area, so I could get an establishing area air scene. As he started to do so, we ran out of gas. He told me we were about to make a forced landing.
I had run out of gas with my car before but I didn’t bargain for this new experience. I silently prayed for a safe landing, and soon we were bouncing on to a field not too far away from the airport. We discovered the gas cap was missing. It had not been secured when the plane was last fueled and, as a result, all the gas had been siphoned out in the air.
My next problem was ground transportation. At the Wheeling Airport, I learned that the taxi had just left for the city. An airport employee was finishing his work in twenty minutes, so I hired him to drive me fifteen miles to a country store in Ohio. There in the store, the owner furnished me with a daily newspaper. I filmed a scene of the woman clerk excitedly pointing to the front page of the Wheeling Intellingencer at a picture of the kidnapper’s accomplice. She told me how she had spotted the man as he and a blond lady entered the store and bought several bottles of milk earlier that morning. It was known that an accomplice of Carl Hall and Bonnie Heady, the confessed kidnappers, had ulcers, and that he was with a blond companion somewhere in the area.
The next scene I filmed was of a highway patrolman stopping and checking cars at a roadblock on Route 40, not too far from the store in St. Clairsville, Ohio. This was enough for a rush story, so I put the film on a plane at the Wheeling Airport bound for Washington, D.C. At 6 P.M. I phoned the N.B.C. news desk to ascertain whether they had received the film package. After giving them the flight number of the plane, they again made a hurried search at the Washington Terminal. However, an hour later I was relieved to see the film featured on the N. B. C. network, ably narrated by John Carmeron Swayze.
As I was eating breakfast in the Wheeling Hotel the next morning, a lady reporter phoned and said she would like to interview me regarding my story, which had featured a close-up shot of the morning newspaper. After a quick interview with Miss Shal Southall at the breakfast table, I was checking over a map when I heard a knock at the door. It was a photographer from the paper who wanted to shoot a picture of me and my camera. I felt somewhat like a celebrity when the evening paper carried my picture with the caption: “He gets news when it’s news.” Under the picture another caption read: “No trouble, expense spared in N.B.C. coverage.” Then, in the story by Shal Southall of the News-Register staff, she mentioned that I lived up to the N.B.C. slogan, “Today’s News Today,” and how no expense was spared to film a feature story for our network news.
Little do people realize, sitting comfortably in their homes and watching the latest TV news, the many unseen difficulties that are encountered in preparing it. Teamwork is required; and it is that that helps to smooth off the rough edges.
A 1933 article about James Pergola gate crashing the 1930 Indianapolis 500 after arriving without credentials.
Read: “Cameraman’s Luck” (PDF file)
Three Pathe men atop their REO Speedwagon in New York City.
British Movietone News cameraman Leslie Murray and soundman Terry Cotter at work.
Most newsreel men during World War Two, enlisted to serve in the Signal Corps or their respective country’s version. Fred Bayliss of Paramount News, however, was one of the few who remained a civilian cameraman during the European Theater.
After covering the Spanish Civil War, Bayliss was assigned as the first cameraman with Paramount to cover the hostilities in France. At the Battle of Dunkirk, Bayliss nearly lost his life along with losing his camera, truck and rations when three German tanks fired upon him. He got out alive after jumping onto a passing British tank and hiding behind the turret. After the incident at Dunkirk, Bayliss was reassigned to cover action in the Mediterranean by Britain’s Eighth Army.
On the eve of Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily, Bayliss boarded an army transport plane in the Western desert of Egypt to head for Sicily to cover the landings. Bayliss never made it to Sicily. While attempting to land, his plane caught fire and Bayliss was burned to death. He left his wife, daughter and sister as his survivors.
British travel still photographer James Allan Cash recalled Bayliss, “Freddy was a grand fellow, completely fearless and quite mad.”
Fred Bayliss is one of the cameramen pointed out to the Newseum by the site editor for the Journalist’s Memorial