How Much Can I Make? - Discover Your Dream Job.
"How Much Can I Make?" - Explores career opportunities and job advice.
If you're looking to understand the job market and want to make informed career decisions, this is the podcast for you!
Whether you're just starting out, or looking to make a major career change, getting the ins and outs of any job, is key to making informed decisions.
This podcast dives deep into what different careers are really like—what the day-to-day looks like, how much you can earn, and what it takes to succeed. You'll hear firsthand job advice from professionals who've been there, done that, and are eager to share their stories.
If you're curious about your next move, or just exploring career possibilities, you're in the right place!
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How Much Can I Make? - Discover Your Dream Job.
A TV Camera Woman - Invisible Yet Essential.
TV Camera Woman
What does it take to capture the perfect shot on your favorite TV shows? Lisa Rosenberg pulls back the curtain on her remarkable long career as a TV camera operator, in the studio and on location. She shares stories that most viewers never get to see. Perhaps most fascinating are Lisa's candid observations of celebrities and their treatment of the crew. She distinguishes between those who acknowledge the humanity of technical staff and those who don't .
Topics
0:00 Breaking Into TV Camera Operation
3:49 Studio Work vs. Field Work
6:15 Breaking Into the Industry as a Woman
8:38 Celebrity Encounters: The Good and Bad
10:29 Union Rates and Negotiating Pay
16:04 Behind the Scenes of Late Night TV
20:56 The Challenge of Live TV and Automation
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Music credit: Kate Pierson & Monica Nation
Actually, I was on a vice presidential debate in October and I didn't have a cough drop unwrapped and my throat started to close up and I started to have to cough and I was on a long, long lens all the way on Tim Walz. I couldn't shake.
Speaker 2:Hi, welcome back to how Much Can I Make. I'm Erav Ozeri, a curious journalist who always want to know how much people can earn on their jobs. Ever wondered who is behind the camera that captures your favorite TV shows? Today's guest, lisa Rosenberg, has been behind some of the biggest shows on television the Tonight Show, jimmy Fallon, good Morning America, 60 Minutes that's just to name a few. She is a seasoned TV camera operator, with stories from behind the studio floor and remote shoots across the country. Let's find out what it takes to get the perfect shot. And let's just roll, lisa. Thank you so much for your time my pleasure, and willing to do that, my pleasure. We'll start with how did you become a camera woman? It must have not been easy for a woman.
Speaker 1:I was really lucky in that I was in Washington DC, which is a fairly progressive city, I think, at the time for women in media. I worked at the campus radio station at University of Maryland where I went and I minored in photography and majored in radio, tv, film, and I had an internship in radio at Public Radio in Washington.
Speaker 1:And when I got out of college I went looking for a job in radio. It was during the Carter administration and they had just passed the equal opportunities about bringing up women and minorities. And I went to this television station and they said would you like to get in a camera trainee program for news for television? And I would work as an audio person in the field, first in news. I started off as an audio operator but my partner was a very he was like a very far thinking guy and he knew that I was a good photographer and that I would make a good camera operator and he trained me. I started to get rotated in as like a camera operator there and I joined the union through there. They, you know, required me to join the union. I was just really lucky. If affirmative action hadn't been in place I wouldn't have even thought to look for a job doing. I didn't realize how good a job it was.
Speaker 2:I saw on your resume that you worked on a lot of TV shows that are not news. You started in news.
Speaker 1:I started in news in Washington in ENG.
Speaker 2:Electronic news gathering. That's what it is Exactly.
Speaker 1:And I had friends who had already moved to New York and when I went up there I realized there was a whole other world of camera work. Besides news, Affirmative action was still pretty firmly in place and I got hired at Channel 5 within a week To shoot what kind of things News?
Speaker 1:Yeah, but the news guys were not kind to me. Guys, because there was no women, would sabotage my equipment. What yeah, they would bend my cables so my video would come back bad. It was a really bad scene and it was just they'd never had any women working there and I think I think the FCC said to them you have to hire women engineers now because you have so few, and a bunch of us all the same age were hired as once and the guys that were working there were not happy about that. I left within six months. I got wind that you know there was a lot of freelance work up here and I just quit. Somebody like hit me that there was studio work as well and I realized multi-camera was a whole different kind of thing.
Speaker 2:It's a lot less physically demanding in a studio, right.
Speaker 1:Sometimes, yeah, I mean, you could be doing handheld in a studio as well, which I did for a while. But multi-camera is like a different kind of physical. You have to physically move. You know the dollies.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:You know, in the field, it's more your shoulders and your back, whereas when you're working in a studio, it's more your arms and your legs doing it.
Speaker 2:Let's say you know you're going to work on a show X Before you start shooting.
Speaker 1:You have to have meetings and decide what angle, what you're going to do. How does it work? Definitely Well, I mean, when you're hired on a show, say you know, and every daytime TV, or even you know evening shows, they're all freelance. You have like a permalance crew. You know they'll say are you available for this many weeks, or something. But if you're lucky, before you work on a show you'll get some observation days to see what the other camera operators do and watch their different positions.
Speaker 1:When you're on a crew, the more you work together, the director gets to know your strengths. It's almost like you're a, like a small orchestra. You know some people are very good at being able to follow somebody while walking backwards and holding focus. I was very good always at finding shots very quickly, like in an audience or when moving around. So on every show you have a camera meeting and you might get shot sheets or you might get you know they'll give you the rundown of what you're going to do. The more you work with the director, the more he knows Lisa or Bob or Bill or whoever is best at this angle or works together better here. So you know you get to know your strengths and stuff.
Speaker 2:You have the director in your headphones all the time.
Speaker 1:Yes, Say you're on a show with six cameras, Okay, you know you'll do a comms check, a communications check, early in the day to make sure your headset is working, to make sure you hear the director, to hear the assistant director, who's the person next to the director, who is like pre-setting the shots. You know, if say cameras two and four are going, the assistant director say all right, five. You got to remember to move around because you're going to be getting somebody coming in from another entrance and moving with them. So you always hear at least two people in your headset whatever they say you have to do.
Speaker 2:If somebody wants to get a young woman, wants to get into the business of camera woman for television, what kind of skills are the most important skills, Besides learning how to operate the camera?
Speaker 1:obviously learning how to get along with guys. I mean because they're you know they can be patronizing. I think that men you know are very different than the way they work in a crew, than with women. When I was younger I think I tried to be a lot more like strident and powerful, but as you get older you learn that you really have to like sort of patronize men but kind of you know, yeah, okay. Okay. You understand that what they're saying is wrong, but it might be the time to just like disagree with them later or something.
Speaker 1:In live TV. I mean, I've had guys like almost physically move in front of me or challenge me. So you have to be aggressive enough that if something like that happens, you know how to handle it and it's happened to me many times but at the same time you have to have a spirit of cooperation, I guess.
Speaker 2:So what advice would you say to someone who wants to break?
Speaker 1:into the business, I would find a mentor. There's one woman I know and she's incredibly successful camera operator, one of the best in the business, and been doing it a really long time and honestly, when she started she used to show up at shoots that she wasn't booked on and she would bring like cupcakes to the guys and stuff. And you know talking, I was always like so creeped out by it. I thought that's so weird and she was always very obsequious. But you know what? She started getting hired by everybody and she is certainly one of the most successful people in the United States.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and she's very good. But a lot of people are very good. But you know she that was the way she felt was her in to get there and it was sort of creepy to me but it worked for her. I remember people criticizing saying she would show up with cupcakes for this cameraman's birthday. But you know, it did it, it worked.
Speaker 2:It worked. Yeah, you happen to meet probably a lot of celebrities who impressed you. The most.
Speaker 1:The ones that impressed me the most are the ones that are nice to the crew people, because so many aren't. I remember, early on I was working at Unitel, which is a stage on 57th Street, and I was doing a show where I was working as a lighting director and a camera operator and we were going to interview Barbara Walters and I was so excited because, you know, barbara Walters, she's news and she's you know, really you know a trailblazer and everything, and I thought I'd lit it beautifully. You know, and I'm not a lighting director per se, but you know, I know what I'm doing I remember she came in with, like I don't know, I think she had another lighting director she'd worked with there. Basically, she looked around, she's like move this, move this, move this. She didn't say one word to me. I was just heartbroken. I thought she's going to come in and go wow, you know a woman LD, a woman camera operator. Literally she didn't even acknowledge me and I've heard that she's really nasty to crews I worked on a show with, say, like Joan Rivers, and she's the kind of person who would come up and introduce herself to every person.
Speaker 1:You know, hi, I'm Joan, nice to meet you. So many people are like that. Everyone who's ever met Bill Clinton will tell you he comes up to kids, loved you know of hers, and I asked her, like I was doing handheld, and at one moment we had a break and I asked her if she would sign them. She just like pushed me out of the way and walked by. You know people like that, I remember, because they're nasty, you know. You mentioned the union?
Speaker 2:It's a union job, right, almost all are. What is the union? It's a union job, right, almost all are. What is the going rate for a union camera person?
Speaker 1:the scale rate. Like IATSE is the cinematographers union, the scale rate is pretty low and it depends what you're on tv, a video operator, it might be 500 or 550 for eight, but for eight hours. But they're the union. Jobs have changed so much, like, say, talk shows or reunion shows or things like that. They might ask you to work they call them now California eights, which has an hour built in for lunch or mostly it's 10 hours and they'll give you that includes a meal. You know, like when I worked on shows at NBC or ABC. Like at NBC their scale is very low. It's, I don't know, 30, 40 something an hour, which is low for a camera operator. But when you get booked on a show like Jimmy Fallon or another show, you say I won't work for NBC rate, I want above scale. And then it's up to you to negotiate. And if you have a reputation you might be able to negotiate. But every show has a different contract with the union.
Speaker 2:Where is the best place to work as far as pay?
Speaker 1:To get on a union show that's long-term, that pays into your insurance, like union insurance and benefits, that's like the best thing to get on. And if you're good, like say, you're on a show like the Daily Show or Stephen Colbert, they very much are protective of their crew and they always tried to keep the same people on so they would give them regular raises. I guess the entertainment is the highest rate but it's also the hardest jobs to get because everybody wants the same top cameraman, whereas there you might make, say, 125 an hour or even 150 an hour. If you were on a smaller show or something, you might make 80 an hour, 75 an hour. There's a big swing. No, it's not bad In studio work because you have so much more of it and you have like long term, for you know the season, or something Like if somebody calls me for a show they say we're working September through December and then you know January through April.
Speaker 1:What's your rate? And I'll ask, obviously as high as I possibly could, but they'll say we can't pay more than let's just say 56 an hour. That might be their union scale and I would say something like well, on another show I was able to work as a different level of union. How about you get me 75 an hour and then you dicker back and forth or something like that?
Speaker 2:but entertainment is definitely the highest paid, yeah did you find out that you develop a certain skill that you didn't have before because you've been a camera woman?
Speaker 1:Definitely, I notice tiny things. I mean that most people you know don't notice. From all my years of shooting and looking for things, you know, like I might see a bug that nobody else sees, or I see, you know, something turned a different way. I'm really good at picking up things turned a different way. Or I'm really good at picking up things and from all my years of doing like, say, working on entertainment tonight or working in news, where you're looking for a certain person when they're coming out of a building, I'm really good at spotting people. Like I'll be walking down the street and I'll say to my husband oh, look, there's Laura Linney or something, and I'm really good at spotting faces. I do have to say I've got and I've become, I think, probably a better photographer you know better visually, of course, from all these years of doing it.
Speaker 2:Besides the physical, you know, having to carry a heavy camera on your shoulder all day any mental stamina that's needed? That's a good question.
Speaker 1:On daytime TV there's a lot of topics that were, you know, talk shows. So you know you get like more emotional on them. But when you're on headsets and everybody's joking and talking and stuff and everybody would always be like Lisa's the one to cry, right, and I would be the one to cry. So if you're shooting something, you have to be able to contain your emotions enough to you know you're doing very exacting work with your fingers and your eyes but at the same time, I guess, be listening and be sensitive enough to like, if I'm on a close up shot of you and you're talking about something really intense, to be able to move, you know, gently and slowly in, while not losing my cool. You know I've been on hundreds of interviews where people are talking about, you know, something horrible they've lost a family member, whatever it is and you have to be able to contain your emotions to photograph it.
Speaker 2:You know, I guess, like any photographer, you said that you freelance and you go from show to show. Do you have to have your own camera if it's not a studio, if it's a handheld?
Speaker 1:No, you're like say you're working on, like the Jimmy Fallon show, because I worked on that quite a bit. There might be eight cameras and one of them is a jib operator who specializes in that. There will be two handhelds that are all run, you know, in the studio by the video engineers and they just get shots of the audience. No, not always. Usually a handheld would be not getting the audience so much unless you had to be climbing up in the risers or something, because it's shakier. You know when you're handheld Right.
Speaker 2:So let's say they call you for Jimmy Fallon. Let's take that first as an example. What is your day like as a camera woman?
Speaker 1:You come in at probably 10 and there might be coffee, there might be craft service you know, if you're lucky there is If I hadn't been on the show before, I walk around and introduce myself and say you know, I'm doing camera three today or something, and the stage managers are usually the people who are controlling the flow on the floor and they'll say you know, nice to meet you. We have a camera meeting at 1030. So at 1030, you know, you're on the set and you have a script. There'll be a script somewhere and like shot sheets, and you'll have a meeting with the director and he'll say, or she will say these are the segments we're doing today, and then we'll talk about each segment. We might break and rehearse them then, or we might rehearse them out of order.
Speaker 1:There might be something pre-taped, like, say, if it's a musical act and they can't be there when the rest of the show is being taped, you might pre-tape something earlier without the audience, and then they would cheat. You know the audience shots in later If it's a demonstration or a guest or something like that. You'll do walkthroughs, you'll rehearse them. So you might have lunch from probably one to two and then you're back and you rehearse again in the afternoon and then the audience is loaded in about 5.30, I think, or 4.30, something like that. You get them in, they have a warm-up comedian there, you're looking at your shots, you're making sure your camera's okay and then they'll start getting cutaways. You know when we're shooting the audience and the stage managers will say okay, everybody in the audience, look sad, look happy, applaud oh really.
Speaker 2:And then you shoot the audience and then they put it in the show.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's done a lot.
Speaker 2:Oh really.
Speaker 1:Yes, always. And then when the show starts it'll be live to tape. Like, say, they'll start at six o'clock and they'll try and keep it as close to live as possible. If you screw up a shot it's not going to be covered. I mean, it's going to be shot that way. You'll shoot it from six to seven and they'll have the breaks for commercials. But once you're live, you know you have to be ready to go all the way through. You've gone to the bathroom before you have some water if you need to. You have cough drops, you know, in case you would cough during the show it would.
Speaker 2:You know you'd hear the sound in the studio. So you have everything ready to go. You're very invisible, but yet you're doing a very important job on a TV show. What's the biggest misconception that people have about camera people do you?
Speaker 1:think that's a really interesting question. I think they're surprised there's so many of them and that we move so much. Like when I would have guests into any of the shows I would work on. You know any of the talk shows I would work on, dr Oz, tyra Banks, I worked on so many different shows. People are always surprised how much we're moving around because when you see it on TV they're you know, static shots and I think they don't realize how physical it is. That's probably a big misconception.
Speaker 2:If you could work on any TV show, past or present, what would that be Saturday?
Speaker 1:Night Live. Why I've? Just because to me live TV is just an incredible art and it's so hard to get right and it's really demanding. When I say that I have a bunch of friends who have worked on it and it's a really hard gig. You have to work really late, you're rehearsing, but I mean, live TV is a buzz like nothing else and it's like working on a Broadway show or something. It's a performance and at the end you know you're so proud of yourself. It's a real buzz.
Speaker 2:And at the end you're still, all you know, high from I've. I would love to work on saturday night live. What happens if you're in a show and you start laughing.
Speaker 1:Somebody says something and you know, you're far enough away that, um, they probably wouldn't hear you but on show, but the camera will shake oh well, I, I'm very good at, you know, holding it in.
Speaker 1:Actually, I was on vice presidential debates in October and I didn't have a cough drop unwrapped and my throat started to close up and I started to have to cough and I was on a long, long lens all the way on Tim Walsh. I couldn't shake, but I was really holding it in. I was like, wow, you know really, yeah. And the director said to me are you okay, do you need some help? And I can't answer. And later on one of the audio guys said yeah, I sort of saw you choking. I was wondering if I should have handed you a cough drug. Of course you should have, but you know you just have to really hold it in and I wasn't able to. I did shake a little bit and you know it wasn't good, but you know I'm human.
Speaker 2:What are the chances that they will automate a lot of the cameras?
Speaker 1:A lot. I mean, if you look at the news now, like my husband likes to watch the CBS news it's all RoboCams I can see that there isn't operators doing it anymore.
Speaker 2:That's in the studio.
Speaker 1:That's in the studio. Okay, yeah, as far as in the field, well, one job that I've been doing, for I started in like 1987, I started working for the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center. They have a theater collection and they shoot the Broadway shows and we usually have four or five cameras and we shoot them one time live. This isn't, you know, like for PBS or something, this is for an archive and I've been doing it for, you know, 40, almost 40 years, and there's several of us that are really good at it that they call. And at the end of last year they told us they're going to go with a company that puts in robotic cameras in theaters and it's not even directed in the theater, it's directed remotely at some facility and they sent around a demo reel.
Speaker 1:You know, I got, I looked at it and I mean it's nowhere near the quality or the you know, discerning the shots that me or my fellow operators would have. But does everybody care about that? You know, if you looked at it you might see, but not everybody cares. It's also, if you use that kind of setup it can be shot over and over and, say, shown at theaters. You know, you've seen these live events where they show you can do that easily. It used to be. There'd be one robotics operator, like at the Jimmy Fallon show. There was one operator who operated cameras that sort of went on the rail around the perimeter. But now studios are thinking well, if I have, you know, 10 robotic cameras, maybe I can have two camera operators to do all of them. And that's the kind of thing that's happening more and more. You know. Now, on award shows and stuff, you see the robot cameras moving around the front, whereas before you had to have you know one person.
Speaker 1:Is it the same quality? Probably not, but you know who notices, you know I notice, you know you might notice, but right, all right, and on that note, thanks. Thank you very much, my pleasure.
Speaker 2:It was very interesting. Yeah, okay, that's a wrap for today. If you have a comment or question or would like us to cover a certain job, please let us know. Visit our website at howmuchcanimakeinfo. We would love to hear from you. And, on your way out, don't forget to subscribe and share this episode with anyone who is curious about their next job. See you next time.
