First two scenes:
Pale, Serbia, 1993: It was so cold that ice was actually dripping from my nose. The camera felt like a dead weight, numbing my shoulder. Inside the building I could see people enjoying hot tea. It had been eight hours since my last warm moment, eight hours out here in the stinging cold and I was getting desperate. Finally the man I was waiting for stepped outside. "Sir, can we ask you a question for American News?" filled with relief I aimed the camera at his face, ready to roll. "Fuck off", he replied as his security man roughly shoved me aside.
Split, Croatia, 1994: The military Hercules was waiting at the far end of the runway. I could barely see it, the heat waves from the scorching asphalt were blurring my sight, making the plane look like a mere mirage. Nobody to give me a lift, I would have to walk. Rucksack on my back, camera case and tripod on right shoulder, camera on the left. Estimation: 60-70 kilos. Distance: one kilometer. Temperature: 38 Celsius. Duration: For Ever.
Suffering, frustration and despair, these are just some of the things cameramen go through on a daily basis. The above are only two examples of en endless stream of miserable memories I have connected to my noble profession. Getting that one picture, that one quote often means going through hell. Yet despite all this, the amazing thing is that cameramen continue doing what they are doing. And even more amazing: that many more aspire to join our ranks.
Over the last years, the tvcameramen.com web site has received hundreds of inquiries from would-be cameramen. "I want to be a cameraman, how do I go about it," is the average question. Obviously there is no one answer. So we decided to allow you a glimpse into the world of professionals and asked real-life cameramen to tell their stories, how they did it, how they got where they are and how they plan to stay on top of things.
Their experiences are compiled below and are all very different but have one common denominator. Passion for the job: Passion for the story, passion getting the picture and passion even for the more depressing aspects of the work. One calls it his "vocation". They simply love what they do so much that waiting for eight hours in the cold, or walking for miles on scorching tarmac are nothing more than just inevitable side effects of an otherwise wonderful profession.
Childhood fascination
Most of us have had a fascination with camera work since a very young age. Barry Paton currently living in France, became fascinated with the magic of photography when he was about eight or nine years old when he watched his elder brother develop a roll of film in the bathroom basin. As a child, Chris Mattlock a Canadian freelancing in Kenya used to watch news on TV. He says that once he realized that there was a cameraman behind what he was watching, he wanted to be one. New Zealander Kerry Du Pond confesses that he "even had the Lego "Live Shot" TV truck and the Playmobile "TV studio" set. Myself, I have been taking pictures since I picked up my father’s Mamiya camera when I was 15.
Stop the recorder from falling
Some like Chris and Barry put their foot in the door by studying broadcasting. After his courses in college Chris says "After learning much about radio and TV broadcasting operations (…) I was able to bag a part-time job in our local TV station as a weekend/weeknight videotape editor for the news department. My boss gave me two weeks of training with some of the senior guys and then, after that, it was sink or swim time. If I screwed up a few times I was out. If I did well I could get more hours and eventually move into shooting."
Others got into the business by family connection. In Robbie Wright’s case one could call it almost inevitable that he would eventually end up in TV: in Australia his father was a cameraman, his grandfather a photographer and his brother is an editor. This goes also for others: In the UK Tony’s father was a snapper and his sister is a reporter and the Dutch Job Scholtze learned how to edit at the age of twelve at his father’s production house.
It is a mistake however to think that a family connection makes things easier for the budding cameraman. As Robbie explains: "I still needed to go to the newsroom at the weekends and annoy everybody to the point that they finally gave me a job. My first job was to stop the recorder from falling on the ground in the days when video was replacing film and the recorder was a separate unit."
And finally there is the group of people that have neither family connections nor a childhood passion for the business. They discovered their vocation by fate.
Joe Yaggi, currently living in Bali, was studying anthropology when his professor showed the class an ethnographic film. "I was blown away. A few days later he showed another and I knew, not only was this what I wanted to do, but also that I could do it better."
Multiple award-winning US cameraman Marc Curtis started off in radio back in 1968. "I had big plans for becoming a well-paid announcer," says Marc. But when he followed one of the other staff members to a live TV show he found himself "watching the cameramen and what they were doing" instead.
Most cameramen never officially studied for the job. Yet all of them got where they are by patiently working their (bumpy) way up. Starting at the bottom of the broadcast ladder, like Robbie, they describe how they spend numerous hours - often nocturnal – working all kinds of broadcasting jobs just to observe the professionals and to accumulate work experience.
Kerry: "In my mid-teens, I started doing some teenage radio shows on the local community access station. When a regional TV station opened up in our area the group of us at the radio station decided that a teenage show would be a great addition to it! After meeting with a producer and discovering that our lack of TV experience was holding us back, a few of us (the more "technical" ones of the group) started doing weekly work experience at the station."
"Over time I learned a lot," Kerry continues, "just from work experience. Eventually I was offered to come assist on a weekly sports OB, which would be paid work. Hurrah! My climb through the ranks had begun, and what better place to learn than on an outside broadcast…Rain, wind, high camera platforms and the ever-looming threat of the electricity cutting off, right in the middle of a game."
Joe started at the campus TV station "I was the only non-film student to work there and started pushing a cart across campus to shoot psychology classes with a tiny little camera. They stuck me in the studio as well where I soaked up everything around me like a sponge."
Starting from the bottom up meant grabbing every opportunity they could. Joe says that during the school year, he shot weddings ("to this day the worst job I’ve ever had") and city council meetings, but that in the summer he shot Whitewater.
So all in all, it might take some (gruelling) time before patience and perseverance are rewarded ("the first six months were a struggle, and I spend most of my time networking and begging for work, no matter what it paid," says Marc). But when it finally does, the experience, built up over so many years, pays off. Barry decided to start his own AV company, at the age of twenty-five. "I was now managing director! For the next ten years I was involved in news, corporates and features in almost every category you can think of."
Staying on top
In TV technology things change quickly. Being a cameraman therefore means constantly trying to stay ahead, especially in the technical field. And the best teacher, as the professionals say, is your own mistakes.
Tony recalls that he had a knack for the technical side of the camera and editing machines, but that the filming itself "came about by shooting crap, realizing that it was crap and trying to shoot it differently until it was less crap."
Kerry adds that he managed to build up a sense of confidence and a "bullet-proof" attitude towards his work "thanks to having encountered many of the worst possible things whilst live on air, or editing that last- minute VT, or trying to line-feed to a client on the other end of the country."
The road to becoming a cameraman is neither short, nor easy. But the suffering endured while climbing your way up is nothing compared to the hardships awaiting you once your business card reads "cameraman". Especially your personal life is bound to suffer. Camerawork will simply rule your life. In Kenya, an old friend of mine missed his own wedding day twice. Birthdays, anniversaries and other important days in the lives of loved ones are there to be missed once you put that one-eyed machine on your shoulder. "This is most certainly not a glamorous industry. It means long days/weeks, un-social hours and broken marriages," warns Nigel Fox from Australia.
Yet the lesson learned from these stories is that if you are willing to sacrifice, work hard, show initiative and determination and develop contacts (because after all, it is still very much a who-knows-who business), chances are that you will get there. Get that coveted job and be good at it. According to Tony it is a question of "putting yourself out there, offer yourself for free and watch very closely how people do things." He adds that there is "no magic or mystery to this job, just a "feel"."
In the end, every sweaty minute you invested in establishing yourself as a cameraman is more than worth it. Because blood sweat and tears are just a cheap prize for the wonderful rewards (/awards) awaiting you. Being a cameraman is simply still one of the most beautiful professions in the world. Not just that. It is indeed a vocation, a passion, a love story. No frozen noses or dislocated backs (another work-related hazard) can make us change our minds about that. As Barry so aptly puts it: "It has not been easy – it was not planned that way and it will never make me rich, but the joy that I get when I have to light a scene and put my eye to the camera is absolute heaven – on top of that I get paid for it – and I am a cameraman!"
Read the whole story on how they did it
- Marc Curtis "I started out in radio in 1968 at age 17"
- Joe Yaggi "Looking back over the journey that brought me here to Bali and Asia, I see the evolution of a cameraman in a most unexpected way"
- Russell Baxter "I was deeply involved with a sport and we had no coaches so we occasionally hired a 16mm film cameraman"
- Nigel "Nige" Fox "I just kind of fell in it really!"
- Tony "How did I choose my vocation? I didn't, it chose me. "
- Barry Paton "Do you want the long or the short version?". I'll make this the medium version"
- Chris Matlock "It was a dark and stormy night......."
- Kerry Du Pont "Ever since I was a kid, television had always fascinated me"
Special thanks to Marc Curtis, Nigel Fox, Joe Yaggi, Laurie Gilbert, Gavin Eyquem, Russell Baxter, Tony, Barry Batton, Chris Mattlock and Kerry Du Pond for contributing to this article.
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