Aaah. This thread has caused me to come out of my lurking shell since I work in the film/tv industry, in the art department, and have had experience with this myself.
Recently we've been filming a number of scenes involving a larger number of 'journalists' - as well as a couple of scenes comming up in the new year of press conferences where we will be having 40 or so extras with potentially just as many cameras involved.
In the scenes we've filmed, and those to come, a fair number of our extras should hopefully be turning up with their own kit - which ranges from fairly decent SLR's to bridge cameras. When we can we will swap out their bridge's and give them a better SLR. However we are of course restricted in what we can actually hand out ourselves quite simply due to cost. To hire out a large number of decent (looking) photographic equipment (including TV cameras), proper lenses and all that, is a huge amount of money we generally just can't afford. So basically if it looks right, at a distance, we have to get away with what we can, and hopefully put a few of the 'better looking' props in the foreground, if we can... And then usually they will film a scene and some extra, who has no idea really, will indeed end up right in front of the camera with their 300 2.8 2 inches from the person they are photographing.. :| sometimes it just can't be helped and alot of the time the AD's arn't going to be paying attention to that sort of detail
and especially if they are not into photography themselves - they wouldn't know!
When it comes to the extras not holding the camera right and not 'acting' correctly, well ive seen it and :bang: . Unfortunatly its been scenes where I havn't been on set at the time so can't really change anything - and even then its more the AD's responsibility - if they knew what to look for.
Yeah sometimes there might be a stills photographer about - but its not their job to go charging in ordering the S/A's or actors about; everyones usually worrying, or looking at, the bigger picture. Half the time extras have no idea what their doing anyway
Its just generally one of those things that can get overlooked very easily what with the hectic-ness of filming and everything else.
He is seen with the camera quite a lot, it's fairly central to his job as blood splatter analyst... 
:annoyed::annoyed:
