Don’t you hate it when the person who catches something amazing on tape drops the camera so that you end up seeing the ground?
Every single time I see a “caught on tape” event on TV, and something happens that’s unexpected, the person with the video camera loses control and thus loses the shot of the scene.
Nowadays, there’s a whole new crop of “caught on tape” scenes using a phone, but YouTube is still full of countless video footage during the heyday of video cameras.
In the case of those cameras, instead of seeing very crucial elements of the disaster or whatever the scene is, I end up seeing the grass, cement or people’s feet from a side view.
Is it so hard to KEEP the tape rolling ON the scene?
Example: Video is on a tourist sticking his hand towards a crocodile’s mouth, which is open, then quickly retracting. He keeps doing this, but suddenly the croc clamps down on his hand.
We see only one second into this because the man with the video freaks and drops the camera, and we get shots instead of what the camera “sees” when it gets dropped…and I don’t mean literally dropped to the ground, but dropped at the person’s side as he apparently watched the scene unfold before him.
I know he wants to see what happens next, but does it not dawn on him that he can capture the scene permanently by keeping the video on it? Hello there?
As a result of this numbskull dropping the camera, we don’t get to see how the man got his hand out of the croc’s mouth!
When people “drop” the cameras, they’re not doing this to help out, because you can tell that the camera is still being held by them, because upside-down and sideways scenery keeps bouncing about in the view.
Another way you can tell they didn’t drop the camera to help out some unlucky person is because the video is taken from a distance, and the same distance is maintained while the viewer sees sideways and upside-down shots of grass, feet, cement, shrubbery, or the fringes of the unexpected event.
If the camera was actually set on the ground so that the camera person could help out, then the “scene” being shot by the camera would be perfectly still!
Why is it that people can’t continue videotaping something when the unexpected occurs? This happens ALL the time, whether it’s on one of those “shocking videos” TV shows, “funniest videos,” “dumbest videos,” daredevil stunts gone wrong, wedding disasters or something more catastrophic like the Boston bombings.
I believe if you’re going to do something, do it right, or don’t do it at all.