People messing with your shot? This is worth seeing!

Lights, camera, action: Australian cameraman drops tattooed attacker | The Courier-Mail (http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national/lights-camera-action-australian-cameraman-drops-tattooed-attacker/story-fndo20i0-1226464874789)

I for one salute the Aussie cameraman involved.

Andrew

He's hired!

GOOD for him! Gotta love the cameraman that stands up to the a**holes that think it's funny to mess with the camera and/or the person running it. AND it's all Caught on Tape!

Sorry, having shot a good amount of hard news, which included having a Betacam camera smashed and been attacked I can't see why the cameraman bothered getting involved with the guy He got the shot of the girl, so the job's job done and his view of her was pretty much over from that camera position before anything happened (whatever it was). Getting involved with the guy meant he was unable to follow up with more shots for his news story - that's his job.

Legal or not, he was assaulted in my opinion and I'm glad someone stood up for "us" camera folk. I've been pushed, prodded, punched, had my 35mm stills camera stolen from my belt and had beer and rum and coke poured on me while on assignment. Tired of hooligans acting with impunity because "you're media, man!"

<slinks back to his cave dragging his knuckles>

Getting involved with the guy meant he was unable to follow up with more shots for his news story - that's his job.

STRICTLY to play devil's advocate, his ability to follow up was nil after his lens was coated in drink. That would require a minimum 5 minute clean up in the van and a return to the station engineer.

"Getting involved with the guy meant he was unable to follow up with more shots for his news story - that's his job."

My sense is that "tattoo guy" was going to dog our camera guy on any follow up shots anyway. It looked to me like he was running interference for the girl so I'm betting our camera guy was going to have to deal with him no matter what. For all I know he may have gotten more shots after the scuffle.

I would say our camera guy did a pretty sweet job though. He got the "perp walk" hero shot and then he got the "kicking a douchebags ass" shot which gave the clip the extra bit of awesome it needed to go viral - thus guaranteeing about a trillion more people would end up seeing the shot.

You seem to reading into the situation, news subjects come in all shapes and forms and unfortunately using street sense goes with the job. This seems to pretty low on the Richter scale and looking at the images of the original incident when filming the woman, media scrums are a lot worse.

I suspect the footage has been aired by the network nation-wide. With obvious pleasure, reading between the lines.

Camerman biff - A Current Affair (http://aca.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=8527395)

Andrew

There were three instances in which I nearly got into it as a news photographer.

One was during a concert where some idiot thought I wasn't authorized to be at the front of the stage -- I was wearing a pass, too. He actually grabbed my camera strap and dragged me backward away from my position, then had some goons escort me out.

I was being held back from beating up the group's manager (cops and security). The manager was probably advised by the cops or security guys that he'd made a serious mistake. He tried to make it up to me offering me to stay for the rest of the concert with free beers. I declined. And I didn't punch him out. Took me a while to cool off.

Two other times I thought I was going to get attacked and I thought the person had a weapon. At one time it was a tire iron. Another time I thought it was a knife. Both times I was getting ready to nail the guy with my motordriven Nikon F2. But both times it turned out OK. Turns out the guy yelling at me with the tire iron just wanted to fix the tire that was flattened by a hand grenade that wounded 14 people. And in the other incident, the schizophrenic guy didn't have a knife in the hand he had behind his back after all. He just wanted to chat with someone, except it was late at night in a sketchy part of town I was working in, and I'm wasn't about to be nice and chatty with a guy who has tatoos over half his face under those circumstances.

Funny thing is that those incidents didn't drive me out of the business. It was seeing people lose their homes or loved ones to tragic fires, accidents, etc.

Turns out the guy yelling at me with the tire iron just wanted to fix the tire that was flattened by a hand grenade that wounded 14 people

Got ME beat! Wow.

The guy with the tatoos wasn't dropped, he stumbled backwards and hit his head on the ground

One of the unstated roles of the camera op is equipment security guard. Would it help if we wore rent-a-cop uniforms when filming in public? :)