Stupidest thing you have done!

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Widescreen

Widescreen

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Reading Queen of Blue describing how he hung out a window to shoot or sitting in a car boot!

Well that got me thinking.

The stupidest thing for me was filming a boat ramp with the camera down low. I was holding it just above the water when a boat came in. Cool I thought, this will look good. Doh!! Completely forgot about the wash from the boat. Completely submerged my camera! In salt water as well. Despite a flush out with fresh water, she died!

Oh well, my boss was not happy for a while, but I think it was more humiliating as it was so stupid.

The only other REALLY stupid thing I saw another cameraman do was a tracking shot, shooting out the front windscreen while driving. Big deal you say? Well HE was driving, with a Betacam on his shoulder! Yes he did get caught and fined.

Okay, I have fessed up.....what about the rest of you?
 
I'm not a sports guy at all, let alone women's golf. Couple of years ago had to shoot interviews after the 18th hole with no reporter. I had a list of golfers I was to get sound from. One was Nancy Lopez. Well according to the sign at the hole she and her partner had just finished. As she finished with the judges and the nonsense they do when they finished I was standing among a throng of video and still shooters. She walked past and trying to stop her I stepped forward and said loudly, "Ms. Lopez, could I get a soundbyte from you?" She stopped, turned and said "Why don't you ask Ms. Lopez, she'll be done with the judges in a moment."
 
In Manitoba Canada it can get cold. We use to bring our camera's in to warm them up between shoots. It never fails the first day of coldness someone usually drives a block or two forgetting their camera....well the chief photog (at the time)went out to a shoot an hour away from the station on one of these cold days. He pulled up and relizes he didn't have his camera.

I would have given five bucks to see his reaction & the reporters. :)
 
Ran into a wall when doing a perp walk once....it only takes once to learn that lesson.

on the brightside....i think the rapist laughed
 
walked away from the cam/tripod when a medical helicopter was landing. bye, bye camera. i did the good thing though---made the reporter call the news director.
 
Oh, the memories...

When I first started out I did a stupid. The reporter I was with told me to get a weather shot of it raining. So I took the camera out, set it on the ground to get a "hey it's raining shot". Only thing, no rain gear.

The camera never worked right after that day. It still sits in engineering (9 years later) as a reminder that people can be stupid.
 
Leaving a tape on the roof of the car. Funnily enough it wasn't there when I reached the feed point.
 
In 17 years, I've:

- Left with no tapes

- Got there with no camera

- Battery? Uhh.....

- Riiiing! "Hello, Reporter X. Whaddya mean I left w/o you?"

- Ssssss..... (Thinking to myself) "Hey, that sounds like a tripod collapsing with a camera mounted on top". BOOM!!! Yep. It was.

Now I'm a chief and I get to deal with others who do this. Ooops.
 
In Manitoba Canada it can get cold. We use to bring our camera's in to warm them up between shoots. It never fails the first day of coldness someone usually drives a block or two forgetting their camera....well the chief photog (at the time)went out to a shoot an hour away from the station on one of these cold days. He pulled up and relizes he didn't have his camera.
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After doing that once, whenever the camera goes inside during the day, i hang my keys on the wireless antenna. I'm not going anywhere without the camera. I did once move from my Ford Explorer to the live truck taking every piece of gear...except for the camera.
 
Long ago, on a shoot downtown, reporter and I were doing stand-ups for an investigative piece. I set the tripod out of the shot to shoot handheld. We get our standups, load into the truck. As I am putting gear in the phone rings, it's the desk they are bothering us about something they could figure out on their own. Finish loading and call it a day. Next day, I load in my truck, go out to my shoot. Open the back and... no tripod! What the!? It dawns on me that I left it at the spot where we did our standups yesterday! I drive over there, it's gone. Oh man, I am in for it now. I called every pawn shop I could find in the yellow pages. No tripod. I get back to the shop and someone from the nearby university called asking if we were missing a tripod. A shop owner next door to where we shot the standup had found the sticks and called the school because I had a mascot sticker on the head. They assumed the tripod went to the school but the school somehow knew they belonged to my station. I quietly got my sticks back and only the reporter ever knew! D'oh!
 
Left a lectro 185 reciever on top of the car when loading in... realized my mistake when it skidded off the roof and onto the pavement in front of me as I hit the brakes.

Jacked my sticks up high to get a shot of classic cars at an outdoor car show. Took the camera off to go handheld. Sticks were left up, uneven grass... I turn away and sticks go THUD! Landed a foot away from a really beautiful car. The look on the owner's face told me that he practically shat himself!!

Oh, to be back in my first year of shooting again.
 
Two come to mind:

I had to work the nightshift, which at the time I was not accustomed to doing. It was an easy night with our story being about a store that had been robbed twice in one week.

Everything had fallen into place that day. The store clerk who had been robbed twice talked (good sound too), they granted us permission to go live, and even the PIO of the local PD called us back in a timely manner. We were done shooting by 6:30pm, and they were going to have the other nightside photog shoot the live shot so I could get home early (I had to work the dayshift the next morning).

I went back to the station, had the package in edit by 9:45, and spent my time working on it (in our NLE). Eleven P.M. rolls around, and I'm sitting at the assignment desk chatting with the AE when a call from the 11pm producer comes to the news room.

"Where's the lead package?"

To my horror, I had forgotten to print it to tape. I raced to the NLE, began it to print, but it was too late. They went to the live shot, the reporter ended up BU!!$h!tting for about two minutes, and the package never made air.

By rear is still smoking from the butt chewing I got from that one.

The other time (thanks for reading this far) was when I got to a shoot 45 minutes from the station, and realized that I had forgotten my camera. Luckily, since I collect old TV equipment, I had a Sony BVW-3 betacam (tube model) that I had been playing with in the back seats. The story didn't look that bad, though the editor was perplexed as to why the story was shot on beta vs. the DVCPRO everyone else was using.
 
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