PERSPECTIVE:
Jacksonville area journalists are being accused of lying to the public about the images shown of the Jacksonville Beach partial re-opening on Friday evening.
Here is some perspective that may change your mind.
The first image is from a Getty photographer who appears to have been shooting with a professional camera and a telephoto lens. A lens like this, likely in the 200-400mm range, gives a compressed look. Think football photos in the newspaper.
The second shot is from my personal live coverage on WJXT at 6 PM Friday. On the left side is live video from my photographer partner who is on the sand with me. On the right side is live video from our helicopter above. You will notice that the left appears to show more people than the right. We showed you both for transparency.
The third and fourth photos are from our Panasonic video camera which we used to go live. There’s me. Proof I was there.
The fifth photo is another split screen example.
I took the sixth and seventh photos with my iPhone 11, one pointing north in the other pointing south, around 6:15 PM.
 The eighth photo was taken by a lifeguard in Jax Beach around the same time.
The moral of the story is, different cameras, different lenses and different angles make the beach look differently.
There was not a secret meeting for reporters and photographers to mislead the public. Quite frankly, we have all been so busy that we wouldn’t have time to doctor anything.
If you take the miles of beaches up and down Duval County, there were indeed thousands of people. However, most kept their distance. And there was a lot of sand.
This post is not about whether opening the beaches is safe or not. That’s not my area of expertise. I’m not a health expert or a lawmaker.
Kindly lay off local journalists working hard to cover a situation. I can assure you almost all of us, my competitors included, have good, honest intentions of keeping you informed and safe.
A helicopter shot looks different from a drone shot which looks different from a telephoto shot which looks different from a smart phone shot.  The optics are different. The angles are different. As your car mirrors say, objects may appear further than they are. Use your best judgement.
Thank you to all who continue to support and trust local journalism. Our jobs depend on it.

Another “c’mon man” moment!
Reporting on the vaccine distribution in Florida... just the basics: who it’s going to first, how it’ll be distributed, etc.
Well, as we prepared for our 11pm liveshot outside a local retirement community, from the public road, a security guard came stomping out.
He didn’t want to hear our polite response that it wasn’t negative and we were on public property.
Apparently he didn’t believe us.
Thanks to that guy for giving us the opportunity to catch up with 4 police officers.
Police officers get a lot of negativity and so do news crews. Good thing we all had mutual respect for each other. We know a few bad apples shouldn’t set the precedent for an entire group of people. There are bad actors in every profession.
Thanks to the officers for being servants, for being friendly and...oh yeah... reaffirming we did nothing wrong for reporting on public property.
Welcome to reporting in 2020. Happens all the time. All good! Thankful for our public servants.
Pfizer’s COVID19 vaccine shipment from Michigan arrived around 9:15 a.m. Jacksonville’s vaccine supply was transported in freezer packs along with 3 million other vials set to be delivered across the country.
CEO Leon Haley, who is also an emergency physician, got the first of 10 shots given on Monday.
Hope everyone had a great weekend!
I’m working the evening shifts this week instead of mornings/days.
It’s going to be an important week as we see vaccines distributed across the U.S. we’ll keep you posted on the big developments!
By the way, this is my cousin Wyatt. He’s the best.
Be well.
