10-8-11

Sometimes, after the nightmare that is a live shot in the predawn darkness in a farm field, the morning light brings on something quite lovely...

We were doing a preview of the Smith Mountain Lake Wine Festival. The morning became a recipe for disaster: To start with, it was essentially at night and in a big field. The autumn weather brought out a thick fog in the cool air. And to top it all off, it was one of the rare days Bob Grebe -- the correspondent who was to conduct the interview -- called in sick.

On the positive side, they had already set up the tents for the vendors, so I had something to light in the background, and the Chamber of Commerce spokesman was an old hand at interviews, able to interact easily with our anchor back in the studio.

But after, as we tore down and I shot some B-Roll for the short story recapping the festival preview, to be shown at noon, the fog made the tents and field and interesting place of mystery, like something out of Ray Bradbury or Dr. Lao.

This is an horticultural center at the Virginia Western Community College in Roanoke, a resource we're often able to call on for Bob's garden segments every Wednesday. I just thought the interaction of the texture, light and structure was interesting.

Bob talks with Clark Becraft of VWCC in preparation for filming a story.

Lately, we've been working on a popular weekly segment called "Do My Job, Bob," in which Grebe tries to take on others' jobs ... usually with only moderate success. The first we shot was making doughnuts at a local place called Blue Collar Joe's. We did the live shot at his downtown Roanoke location, Uptown Joe's.

Here we see Bob, as usual, trying to upload information to the web between live hits in the show...

I like this picture, even though it came in the middle of a very hectic and frustrating day, but I find it quite poignant in its way.

This is the setup for a military funeral, after the family has left the burial site. The Army, long experienced in these things, arranged a small packet of tissues in every family member's seat. However, the soldier buried that day went missing during the Korean War. Lost and captured by the North Koreans, he starved to death as a POW. His remains were finally returned with a number of others in a mass repatriation. After identification by the military lab in the US, he was finally returned to the family, which had him buried with full honors in Pulaski, Virginia, on a cool autumn day under a light drizzle. It was some 60 years after his loss. A young man when he died, the soldier had neither a wife nor children. None of the tissue packs was used.

On another "Do My Job, Bob," he learned how to do glass blowing, a task that seemed to particularly delight Bob. I was terrified throughout the shoot, as I spent most of my time between the table and bench in the foreground, where they were maneuvering molten glass on the end of a long tube, and the furnaces in the background, averaging about 2000 degrees.

It was a tight fit as it was, but the TV camera makes you blind to the right side and behind you, making it easy to back into something ... something very hot. Somehow, we made it through the shoot without incident.

H&J Tire in Lexington, one of my favorite businesses these days. That's my car in the background, and that's one of those pathetic not-really-a-tire spares on the front right. I popped the tire (yep, popped it -- ran into a big hole in the road) on the way home for work, but needed to be back at work before dawn the following morning. They had me changed out with a new tire, without warning, in an hour.

I love living in a small town.

Back at Smith Mountain Lake, another morning fog makes for another lovely landscape. I think I'm beginning to understand why people pay a lot of money for homes there...

This amused me. These are Northside high school students on the roof of their school building. We had all gone up there to make pictures of the student body on the playing fields below, standing in the shape of a giant pink ribbon. Climbing up the twelve-foot ladder through the hatch to get to the roof was easy enough for them, I guess. (It was somewhat more difficult for me with the tripod you see in the background and my twenty-something-pound camera -- I've had problems with that before.)

But the getting down apparently presented more of a problem. Here they look into the tiny abyss with horror.

In the end, the greatest problem was ensuring no males were beneath as they clambered down in their tiny miniskirts...