Fair and white balanced

If you aren’t clicking on Viewfinder Blues most days, you’re missing the most amusing TV news blog in the business.  We’ve written before about our man-crush on Stewart Pittman (though we’ve never actually met).  He’s a guy who slogs through a day shooting news at WGHP in High Point NC.  Then he goes home, puts the kids to bed and (presumably) fills a tumbler with dark liquor and starts to write.  It’s doubtful any of the paid writers at WGHP have much more than a fraction of this guy’s writing talent.

He’s got a great eye for the small issues that surround the local TV news business.  Pittman apparently makes liberal use of a still camera he carries on shoots.  The results turn up frequently on Viewfinder Blues.  This piece from June is a good example.  Pittman probably banged it out in ten minutes.  It’s brilliant.  This is but an excerpt.

You can tell A LOT [about] a photog by watching them white-balance. Take this cat. When he stumbled in late to a press conference in motion, a PR chick sidled up and jammed a program in his hand. He never looked at it; just stuck [it] in front of the lens and calibrated his colors. That the speaker he was about to shoot was standing under a spotlight thirty feet away didn’t seem to bother him. I like that; if only because it drives the production types crazy.

You owe it to yourself to read the entire post, especially if you’ve ever asked or been asked “got something white?” prior to a shoot.  Me, I’d hike up my dress shirt to show off the nearly-white t-shirt rippling over the beer-fed abdominal sixer.  It always worked well enough for TV news.