behind the camera in pictures
Found in the dusty archives of the Internet is this early 1961 KTTV “television tape” demo of the revolutionary wipes, fades, effects and keying newly available at the time. Today we would call this “AVID-itis.”
Unidentified Fox Movietone News newsreel crew in Guntersville, Alabama, mid 1930s.
Newsreel crews of Cinesound Review of Australia out front of their studios in the mid 1930s.
Fox Movietone News’ Eric Bierre (paying bridge toll) and Ray Vaughan on the roof of their Packard.
Ever wonder who was the fool who came up with the concept of a press conference? Those lovely events where someone wearing very nice clothing stands before a podium full of mics, drones on and on while you silently pray the event ends before you die of boredom?
You can blame an ingenious Warner-Pathe News cameraman and an ornery general who was a stickler for military decorum for it.
During World War II, Warner-Pathe’s Cliff Poland joined the Army as a photographer for the U.S. Army’s Signal Corps, following the Joint Chief’s across the globe from event to event to record the proceedings for posterity. One of Poland’s assignments sent him to Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945 to record the formal surrender of the Japanese Empire to the Allied Forces aboard the USS Missouri (Poland can be seen behind his newsreel camera on the left in the photo to the right).
The Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Douglas MacArthur, demanded absolute dignity for the proceedings about to take place on the Missouri‘s 01 level deck right down to the words he chose in his speech announcing the surrender to the world – and made it absolutely clear that he would not tolerate the attending newsmen sticking a cluster of microphones in his face.
So Cliff Poland, in a fit of ingenuity, rigged up a stand to hold the cluster of microphones in a manner that was acceptable to the general, history was made upon the teakwood decks of the Missouri and a system still used in press conferences today was born.
Sixty-six years ago on this date in 1943, photographer Joe Rucker of Paramount Newsreel sits in a Californian potato field loading film into his Bell & Howell Eyemo camera.
Rucker earned a place in history fifteen years earlier, when in 1928, he and another Paramount news photographer, Willard Van der Veer, accompanied Admiral Richard Byrd on his historic trip to the South Pole. The footage shot during that expedition earned Rucker and Van der Veer an Oscar for Cinematography in 1930.
Major world events Rucker also filmed included the opening of the Panama Canal in 1915, the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, the 1927 Chinese Civil War and many major battles in the Pacific Theater during World War Two.
Rucker died on October 21, 1957 at the age of 70 in his home in San Francisco after a forty year career shooting the news wherever it broke across the world.
Stewart “Lenslinger” Pittman and his photog fashion commentary was the first though that came to mind when this frame showed up in my Avid preview window…
Photographer Cliff Poland with Warner-Pathe News out of their Miami office in late autumn of 1950.
Read a bit more more about Poland and a news practice he pioneered over at Viewfinder Blues.
Warner-Pathe News cameramen George Dorsey, Murray Alvey and Clarence Ellis outside of the White House. As a bit of trivia, Murray Alvey was the very first NPPA PoY.
Universal Newsreel photographer Harry Walsh filming graduates of the St. Petersburg Charm School at Al Lang Field, St. Petersburg, Florida on November 29, 1947.
The newsreel era version of logging tape…er XDCAM discs, P2 cards…
