From getting creative....to getting a little hot in here...

Today started off easy, as most hard days do, I didn’t even have a story assigned for the first half hour. Then my reporter and I got sent out to do another story about the price of food going up. We never have good luck with these stories because no one wants to let us shoot in their story when the story might show the store in a bad light. Like say, they have expensive food,(even though everyone is raising prices and they aren’t alone.)

Whatever, anyway, they make a million calls and finally find one small market that will let us shoot. We managed to get all of our interviews and video pretty quick leaving, about 6 hours until the story was going to air. I wanted to drive around for a bit until the bosses went home and to make it look like we were working really hard, but the car decided it was done for the day and the temperature warning light came on.

I switched out into a new vehicle back at the station and promptly sat on my butt for about 2 hours.

While waiting for my story to be written, so I could start editing it, I was sent to Selma to get some video of a post office closing. I barely made it out of the city before the desk called, asked where I was, and if I saw smoke. Off in the distance a great big plume of smoke. From the drive in, it looked like the thing was going to be leveled when I got there, but it was still going hot and surprising less than a 3rd of the place was even burned. The fire department was able to save most of the building, letting the add on burn out.

I’m not sure what happened, but one of the hoses must have knocked some boards off or something because off of a sudden the fire doubled in size and things were getting a little warm.

Between the singed hairs and the constant rain of embers blowing from the surrounding trees that had caught fire, it was time to leave.

Got my shots in Selma and made it back to the station in time for me to put my story together.

Updates...

When I started this I thought it would be easier to post pictures and updates about stories I'm working on, but the camera on my phone doesn't work well at night and well I'm usually too busy with the bigger camera I have shooting my story. I've also been having some reporter issues that have left me drained everyday from holding back and not telling them what a horrible person they are.....but anyway...

I've been covering some interesting things lately like this thing that happened up in Merced last week.

This guy ran into a court house with 2 kitchen knives, 1 in each hand, and stormed into a court room. He didn't respond the sheriffs deputies and they opened fire killing him. Everything happened so quick, it was hard to put together what happened. For our station we sent 2 reporters and 3 photogs, which is rare, and we had some awesome team coverage up there, blowing everyone away....except that for the 5 (whenever I refer to a number as an object, I'm talking about our shows at 5, 6, and 11) we had terrible audio because we weren't able to tune in a good enough signal from where we were I tried to tell them that is was where the truck was parked and we needed to turn it 180° and it would be ok, but they just had us use it anyway and setup another truck that actually got a worse signal. They finally cracked and listened to me almost an hour after I told them what the problem was.

Well we got the 5 and 6 taken care of and then had some time to rest and prepare for the 11.

One part of this job I could really do without is the dead bodies...and having to get video of the coroner taking them away. We won't air video of a dead body, but we will show a dead body in a body bag. I was 5 feet from this guy as he was being wheeled into the coroner's van, it smelled, and it was weird.

Anyway, more will come, but until then if you have any questions feel free to email me or comment below.