The Darkest Crime Scene in the World!

I am not really going to touch on how totally bastard like it is to murder someone on Christmas, even though this murder seems to be more like an accidental murder than anything else. But still, I was worried that I would have to go to at least one Christmas Morning murder and I did.

The real bitch about this was that it was out, south of the city off Las Vegas Blvd. I didn't even know people lived this far out, but they do! The problem was that there were no street lights around. So it was very dark, as you can tell by my pictures here.

I bumped up my camera as high as I could to 18db gain and STILL couldn't hardly see anything. I was actually surprised when I watched it on TV... It came out a lot better than I thought it would, considering. But it was times like this I missed my NewsChannel 20 gear. I had a brand new DVCPro camera there that had a 30db super gain. And (this part will probably only be understood by the other photogs) what was cool was the noise was soft enough in the video to where even at 30db the grain wasn't that distracting.

In fact, here is a video capture from a story I shot on 30db gain there.


Anyway the darkness continued even after the detective cars began to show up. It was 3AM and there wasn't going to be any sunlight for another three and a half hours, and I didn't plan on staying that long.

Then my photography was foiled by a cop who turned on his headlights to see something. Everything was now back lit. When I irised down enough so my shot wasn't flooded out, I couldn't see ANYTHING! I asked the perimeter cop if he could radio his buddy and have him turn off his lights, but he just laughed at me.

So much for my Christmas present from METRO...

At any rate, the Homicide guys were waiting on a search warrant so they gave us our sound really quick and we bolted to Triple Play for Christmas Dinner. NBC, ABC and CBS all sitting, enjoying our Philly cheese steaks without a care in the world.

Actually now that I think about it, we ate before the murder...

Well, whatever. I've lost track of what I was talking about, so here is the moral of the story.

Even in the city of neon and bright flashing lights, there's one block that's dark as a mother fuka...