Shooting News

This is a new page for archiving my posts on shooting TV news — the stories that I’ve done and posting on this site, as well as my blogs about what I do as a TV news shooter and one-man TV news reporter. This may expand into other things as well. I’ve had several people ask me lately about what my next book will be about and whether it could be about how I do TV news, a field that they are very interested in themselves.

If you have any thoughts or interests in such a book — especially if you’d be someone who would actually buy a copy! — please send me a note.

I’m also on Facebook and welcome hearing from people, what your interests are and if you visit this site and how often.

Many thanks — and more to come –

MIKE

Good Deeds Open Doors At Goodwill

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Good Deeds Open Doors At Goodwill

The last day of 2011. New Year’s Eve. KCRA reporter Brian Hickey and I are sent out on assignment to cover people making last minute donations to get breaks on their 2011 taxes. Last year Brian Hickey had gone to the Deseret Industries thrift store and done stories and morning live shots at their drive-up donation area and it had gone very well, so we headed over there. This time, however, we were told that all media requests had to be submitted in writing and would be sent to Salt Lake City, Utah, (Deseret Industries is operated by the...

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KCRA – SPCA Adopt-A-Thon Preview 11-11-2011

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KCRA – SPCA Adopt-A-Thon Preview 11-11-2011

I’m rushing to post this story this evening to help promote the Sacramento SPCA 11-11 adoption drive that begins tomorrow, Friday, November 11 — 11/11. On an average day the SPCA adopts out 25-35 pets a day. On Friday, 11/11, their goal is to get 111 pets into new homes. It typically costs around $100 to adopt a dog and $85 to take home a cat from the SPCA. But on Friday, 11/11, you can adopt a dog or a cat for only $11.11. The SPCA has seen a huge number of animals who had been family pets relinquished...

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Portraits of Protest – Occupy Oakland General Strike

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Portraits of Protest – Occupy Oakland General Strike

You never know what people are going to like. I was crossing the newsroom where there was a news meeting going on and one of the managers said, “We really liked the pictures you got at the protest yesterday.” At first I thought he was talking about the stories that I shot with KCRA reporter Mallory Hoff at the Occupy Oakland protest in downtown Oakland yesterday (Wednesday, November 2, 2011). Then he said he was talking about the snapshots I’d taken and sent back. Someone else asked me what camera I was using because they were so cool looking....

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KWCH – Runners Photo Essay 1984

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KWCH – Runners Photo Essay 1984

I’m posting this as an historical artifact. It isn’t great television, in fact, it’s the kind of story that I don’t think anyone does anymore. This story is significant for one major thing in my life, however. It’s the first time my name was mentioned on TV. KWCH Runners 1984 from Mike Carroll on Vimeo. First off about this type of story. In today’s TV news climate many people could say that this is not fitting for TV news. “This isn’t news. This is a music video. You’ve taken a news event and reduced it to MTV.” “This is...

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KWCH Roadside Kansas Documentary 1987

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KWCH Roadside Kansas Documentary 1987

The general notion about Kansas is that it’s long and flat with not much to look at besides corn and wheat. I drove straight through the state a couple of times on my way to and back from California and tried to time it so that the eight hours it took to traverse the 400 miles from the eastern to western border could be done at night. I have to say that once I started living there, I was dead wrong about the state. In the mid-80s Kansas geologists Rex C. Buchanan and James R. McCauley wrote a book...

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KCRA – Searching For WWII MIA’s

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KCRA – Searching For WWII MIA’s

A month or so ago we got an e-mail at KCRA about two local people who were putting together a coffee table book about searching for lost servicemen from World War Two. This e-mail led me to Jennifer Powers in Grass Valley and Dan O’Brien in Woodland, who are volunteers in the Bent Prop Project. Once a year they travel across the Pacific, at their own expense, to the tiny islands of Palau to search for and identify downed aircraft from World War Two. This is where the Battle of Peleliu took place in September, 1944, where 2,000 Americans...

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My 2010 MMJ Resume Reel

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My 2010 MMJ Resume Reel

A few weeks ago, after I posted my 1995 resume reel, I got to thinking about how long it’s been since I’ve put together an audition reel or a compilation of my work. I’m a different person and photographer than I was then. My thought process and technical methodology has changed. I looked at some of those stories and thought, “How did I shoot that? Everything’s on a tripod — I don’t know if I could do that today.” Then my next thought was the same one that always comes up in news: “What have you done lately?” Last...

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Remembering the 1991 Oakland Hills Firestorm

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Remembering the 1991 Oakland Hills Firestorm

On Sunday, October 20, 1991, the hills above Oakland and Berkeley, California, were ravaged by an extraordinary firestorm. Immediately, KCRA-TV, in Sacramento, dispatched every available crew and as many other photographers and reporters who they could reach on their days off and sent them in to cover this unbelievable event. In a matter of just a few hours over 2,500 of the most beautiful homes in the most desirably locations in the Bay Area were ravaged by fire and, quite literally, disappeared into scattered ashes. The next day, all of KCRA’s photographers and reporters were sent in to cover...

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Babylon City Market in Sacramento – Expanded Story 8-20-2011

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Babylon City Market in Sacramento – Expanded Story 8-20-2011

This is a much expanded story about the Babylon City Market at 1745 Watt Avenue in Sacramento, California, That ran on KCRA’s once-a-month magazine program Common Ground. A much shorter regular news version ran on the KCRA Channel Three Reports at Six O’Clock on Tuesday, July 19, 2011. When I went out to shoot the story it was always the intention that it would also run on Common Ground. Before even setting foot in the place I knew there would be a much larger story with much, much more information than I could condense into a one minute and...

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My 1995 TV News Photographer Resume Tape

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My 1995 TV News Photographer Resume Tape

One of the big cloudy mysteries in the TV news business is The Resume Tape*. Or “Get-Away Tapes” as they’re called when you’re starting out in a tiny, unknown, nothing berg of a map on a dot that has a TV station, and probably a morning farm report. An entry-level, small- to micro-market station that barely pays anything that you’re desperate to get started at, and then just as desperate to get out of. All that said, this was not my Get-Away-Tape. This...

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