THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 22, 1996 TAG: 9609180048
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K1 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: MY JOB
SOURCE: BY WENDY GROSSMAN, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 85 lines
AT 10 A.M., sitting at the producer's desk in the newsroom at WAVY-TV, Pat Dowd hunts for each key as he types in the notes he took on a court case he photographed an hour ago.
Cameras are rolling 30 feet away. Doors open. Phones ring.
Dowd, 46, has been a news photographer (he doesn't like to be called a cameraman) for WAVY since 1976.
But he's been in TV longer than that. He put himself through college working as an engineer at the New York TV station where his father worked.
``My father was a cameraman at the Mets games and before that, Dodger games in Brooklyn,'' he says later.
Dowd shot Mets games for a while, but he likes working in news better.
``I get to go all around town and overseas,'' he says.
Dowd is Channel 10's designated courts photographer, but he's been sent to Norway, Italy, Spain, the Persian Gulf and the Virgin Islands.
Going out on military ships is his favorite assignment.
``I get to play with the military for a day, or a week at a time,'' he says, grinning. ``I think most guys have a fascination with military equipment. I'm one of the earlier baby boomers, born in 1949. We grew up playing army.''
On the battleship Wisconsin he photographed big orange balls of fire exploding from 16-inch guns. And he's flown in a B-29, the biggest bomber in World War II.
Not as much fun was standing in high winds and high water filming hurricanes in the Outer Banks.
``We're expendable,'' he says. ``When the emergency services people are telling folks to get out - we're heading in.''
He gets wet. He gets cold. And his neck hurts.
But his neck always hurts.
Today's cameras aren't 60 pounds anymore, but 25 pounds of metal sure ain't a feather. A few years ago a camera compressed one of Dowd's nerves.
``I'm pretty much stiff all the time,'' he says. Usually it's his right shoulder, where the camera rests. Today it's his left.
Dowd has filmed Mikhail Gorbachev, Jimmy and Billy Carter, Hillary Clinton and Colin Powell. But not every subject is media-friendly.
Willie Mays came after his dad wielding a baseball bat as he filmed Leo Durocher throwing a fit, Dowd says.
Dowd doesn't just turn the camera on and move away. He's not a cameraman like his old man, he insists.
Dowd's a photographer. He knows what an F-stop is. And he thinks about every picture before shooting it. He looks at the composition. And he considers his viewer.
For instance, he never shoots an uncovered body. But he sees a lot of them.
``You see things, but you don't shoot them,'' he says. ``You see things you wish you hadn't seen.''
He saw a man's head sliced off by a tractor-trailer on the Chesapeake Bay bridge-tunnel. He watched two bodies being hauled from a flaming pick-up truck. And he was on the scene after two girls were murdered in Berkley.
``You get used to it,'' he says. ``You don't concentrate. You don't stare at it. I'm here to get what I need to put on the air, and that's it.''
He's not married. ``The hours aren't real conducive to a family,'' he says. His set hours are 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. But news happens 24 hours a day, so he's been called in at 3:30 a.m. That's why he doesn't have any pets, either. ``They could starve to death waiting for me to come home,'' he says. Instead he's got about 80 teddy bears.
He volunteers with the Girl Scouts. Makes toys. Sails his boat. And operates his ham radio when he's not working.
By 5 p.m. he's shot four tapes. Four stories.
He tucks a mike into his bag, grabs a tripod and heads inside an elementary school to set up.
His right eye squints through the camera lens as he adjusts the color. Then he waits.
He does a lot of waiting. And a lot of reshooting when lines are garbled or messed up.
``I tell new reporters that if they do more than 18 takes on a stand-up they have to buy me lunch,'' he says.
No one has.
He winds up the camera's cable, and neatly folds up every piece of his equipment. He lugs it all back to the station's white Blazer, takes another swig of his Dr Pepper and heads back to the studio. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
MARTIN SMITH-RODDEN/The Virginian-Pilot
WAVY-TV news photographer pat Dowd loads his 25-pound camera into
his truck after shooting a press conference at Chesapeake City Hall. by CNB