Cameramen Who Dared.

• Author: Rothenberg, Robert S.

Columbia TriStar Home Video 60 minutes / $19.95

Viewers have become almost jaded at seeing amazing photography in documentaries or on news programs, with probably only a handful giving any thought to how those images were captured. As this fascinating video explains, "Behind every exciting film image is a cameraman." The lengths to which these intrepid photographers will go to get the footage is incredible. This becomes readily apparent as viewers watch cameramen (and women) swimming among great white sharks, following soldiers into the front lines as bullets fly overhead, diving beneath eight-foot-thick ice at the South Pole, or climbing Mt. Everest.

For those who think such outstanding camerawork is a product of today's technology, Carl Akeley and Osa and Martin Johnson were conducting "photo safaris" in Africa in the 1920s, coming back with footage of pygmy tribes and exotic wildlife that movie audiences rarely had heard about, much less seen. In 1914, John Williamson lowered a 30-toot-long tube beneath the ocean's surface and, shooting through a window, became the first to record underwater motion pictures. Capt. J.B. Noel accompanied a British...