About those headphones . . .

Just having an expert tell you how you should develop a new set of skills, doesn’t necessarily constitute a lesson learned.

Case in point: an early effort to get good, clean audio from a brief interview.

I gave myself a Father's Day photo assignment for the newspaper to cover a father and child enjoying an afternoon performance at a traveling circus in town. This could make a nice front page centerpiece for our next issue. I wound up getting a much stronger image of a circus performer juggling three lit torches, which became the centerpiece with the father-and-son image subordinated. I had caption information on the father and son, but none on the circus performer, which meant I had to return to the circus.

So why not take the opportunity to practice gathering good audio by interviewing the ringmaster, right?

Even before setting foot on the circus grounds, I decided that wearing the recommended over-the-ear headphones might look rude, if not a little weird for a newspaper guy, so I opted to wear ear buds, instead. Once face-to-face with the ringmaster, I lost nerve even to wear the ear buds. I simply used the little directional mic plugged directly into the recorder and hooked that over the top of my shirt pocket so both hands could be free to take notes. Why? I’ve been sabotaged too many times in the past, thinking that taking notes weren’t necessary as long as I was recording an interview.

I wrote the caption from my notes, as usual, then sat down that evening to listen to my audio recording. The interview itself took less than five minutes. At the time, I didn’t notice the light breeze blowing across an unshielded mic, nor the plane landing at the airport next to the fairgrounds, nor my occasional shifting from foot to foot apparently swinging the sensitive little mic away from the interviewee.

[heavy sigh here]

Okay, I get it now: headphones – the big, honking, over-the-ear kind.