Scene on the Road

The Labor Day weekend is the traditional end of the summer, so I'm finishing up my summer of road trips by sharing some of YOUR photos. I'll post more through the weekend, so check back here this weekend between grilling burgers, getting ready for school, putting away your white clothes, watching the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon and celebrating the achievements of American workers. Enjoy.

Speaking of traditions, Inquirer photographer Charles Fox and his family rented an RV this summer and headed out on the classic cross country vacation road trip. Even traffic jams - this one in Yellowstone National Park - look different under western skies. Before he left, Fox completed a series of photo essays celebrating the historical moment 60 years ago when Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier. Look for the "Multimedia" heading after clicking on the link.









Closer to home, John Elliott took this one of his son Seth while he played in the surf at Wildwood.

"Having ice cream on the boardwalk, does it get better than that!!!!"
That's how Jim Troiano captioned his photo.

Raymond Varisco and his wife Susan spent their summer "Day Tripping" to festivals around the area.

They witnessed "The Great Sack Race," at the Old-time 4th of July celebration at Fonthill Museum, in Doylestown, which also included a watermelon-eating contest. Varisco tells me, "Besides the sheer fun of driving for its own sake, road trips are a means of exploring what surrounds us. And since 'every picture tells a story,' photographs are a way of recording and retelling the story of where we've been and what we've seen."

He continued saying he and Susan "share a love of reading and of music and of listening to and telling all kinds of stories; and I think our enjoyment of road trips is a natural outgrowth of that love." The Polka band was at the Kutztown Folk Festival.

Steve Smith stayed close to home in Burlington, N.J. photographing on the Delaware River as members of the East End Yacht Club, raced on Thursday nights. He shot from the Promenade at the end of High Street. He says "I am just a guy with a camera who is addicted to water and boat pictures."

Lisa Polidora "loves watching the wildlife interacting and trying to get some good shots." She goes "a few times a week" to Lake Lilly, which is across the road from the Cape May Lighthouse, where this photo was taken.

Diana Keat, a member of the Delaware County Camera Club carried her camera around Pennsylvania Dutch County. She found "this mare was initially very leery of my existence, but ultimately warmed up to me and even nuzzled my hand looking for a treat."

If you've read this far, I'll give you a last minute chance to have your photo included in my next posting. Send me your jpeg as an e-mail attachment to Roadtrip@phillynews.com. Include info about the photo, including when and where you shot it, along with any of your thoughts about photography along the road.






Finally, for now, two contradictory signs caught the of eye Freeman Miller while "on the road" on his usual walk across the Temple University campus near his home in North Philadelphia.

Remember to check back later for more photos...cheers, TomG

Toward the end of this summer's blog, I've asked you to share YOUR road trip photos. Some readers looked beyond the roadside, toward the skies:

Bill Corcoran, focused to infinity, and beyond this farm on U.S. Route 30 in Lancaster County, "while cruising to Fuddruckers restaurant."

"The important thing to note (along with three other photos he sent me) is that they were taken out of a moving vehicle," he added, not saying whether he was driving or a passenger.

Becky Bryan, on a mission trip to the Lakota Indian Reservation in Pine Ridge, SD wrote she was "stuck" on the side of the road when their van broke down. "Fascinated by the rapidly changing...cloud shadows (that) would sweep across the prairie, turning the mundane into spectacular and back to mundane again," she captured some of the moments when there was the most contrast of light and dark. If not for the engine trouble, "I never would have witnessed this ever changing beauty," she reflected.

Jim Klotz photographed the late summer sunset over Lake Towamensing in the Poconos.

Terry O'Brien observes "many people don't know that the New Jersey Pine Barrens is within an hour of Philadelphia," and took this Oswego River kayak trip "after the water level rose a foot after the nor'easter in August. We were the only people on the River and if you stopped paddling, there was no sound - no traffic, no airplanes, even the birds were still."

Steve Perzan captured this roadside Americana along N.J. Route 47 just south of Courthouse-Dennisville Road. He calls the photo "American Honor."

"This house sells the American Flag 365 Days a year. Although the Flags are made in China they still are Old Glory for me," he says.

Harry George has been in sales for years and always carries a camera in the car, shooting "Roadside America." He and his wife were in Utah the first two weeks in May, beginning their trip at Zion National Park heading north using two lane highways, including the National Scenic Byway (Utah Route 12) through Bryce Canyon National Park through to Salt Lake City.

The antique RV, an old Dodge motor home, Harry reports, is now used as "a traffic stopper for a gas station."

In early April, Kathy Miller and her husband went into New York City and "got a little taste of Paris." They toured City Hall, with its Renaissance Revival exterior facade, and walked over the Brooklyn Bridge - "our version of climbing the Eiffel Tower." She made this photo as they sat by a fountain, "like strolling through the Jardin des Champs-Elysées."

That's why, Kathy says, "when people ask why I live in NJ I say it's because I can have a European experience without crossing the Ocean!"

Also in NYC, Inquirer staff photographer David M Warren shot the scene at right on the streets of Manhattan.

A last minute reminder: You've got one more chance to have your photo included in Labor Day posting, and possible publication in the newspaper this Thursday. Send your jpeg to me at Roadtrip@phillynews.com as an e-mail attachment. Please include info about the photo, including when and where you shot it, along with any of your thoughts about photography along the road.

Looking back on this Labor Day weekend, here are more of YOUR summer road trip photos. Some were taken along the usual roads - and a few on routes "less traveled by," to paraphrase the oft-quoted New England poet Robert Frost - that sometimes make "all the difference."

Michael Kimble took a road trip to Vermont and south of Middlebury, found the cabin Frost lived in during summers from the 1940's until his death in 1963.

When Michael was there, he says, "no one else was around. The location, as you would expect, is beautiful, secluded, and peaceful." The locals don't want to invite too much attention to the cabin, he figures, as it's "accessible only by an unmarked dirt road that must be taken (pun intended) for a half-mile and then a trail walked for about 100 yards."

Ingrid and Jonathan Cheng and their family took a road trip to Boston and then to Acadia National Park, where a third of the way to the summit of Penobscot Mountain, "the kids (ages 3, 5, 7, 9) were taking a breather and enjoying the view of Jordan Pond from up high."
Ingrid went on to say, "the view from the summit was totally awesome. I was so proud that the kids and Grandpa (age 60) climbed to the top without any carrying, especially at one point, when we were pretty much climbing some pretty steep rocks."

Grandpa, Ingrid's father Jung-Yiao Yeh, who was visiting from Hualien, Taiwan, said they have "beautiful mountains and the blue Pacific Ocean, but this (Acadia) is incomparable."

"Maine is definitely a place where I would love to come back again, for a longer period of time. It's so peaceful and life seem to slow down," Ingrid added.

Mallorie McRea visited the mountains of Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, where her father spent his summers as a child. "In keeping with his family tradition," Mallorie writes, "he likes to drag us to this middle-of-nowhere town every summer."

They started at the local neighborhood pool, and "on this particular day," she continued, "the fire company was having its annual summer block party. How lucky were we! Little did we know my dad had this planned the whole time."

Her dad, Tim McRea, emailed me to recommend Heisler’s Dairy about 5 miles outside of town, "a great place to enjoy ice cream, miniature golf and a great golf driving range all surrounded by mountains. They just celebrated their 50th anniversary in July."

Rosemary Mackintosh sent in a photo - taken just last week - of her sons Owen and Luke on the early morning beach at Ocean City, NJ. They were searching for “good shells” before everyone else got there, she explained.

Lisa Polidora likes to photograph nature in the wildlife-rich waters around Cape May. The muskrat was in Lake Lilly, across from lighthouse. "That one in particular was very friendly and wasn't bothered by me at all," she told me.

Inquirer staff photographer Charles Fox and his family traveled out West in a rented RV this summer (that's not their home on wheels in the photo). The super-sized prairie dog was in South Dakota's Badlands.

Also in the West, Harry George photographed an automotive yard sale in Glendale, Utah. He titled the picture: "Another Man's Treasure."

Diana Keat made this still life in Pennsylvania Dutch County, at the Mascot Roller Mills. "A wonderful place to visit," she wrote, "stepping back in history even for just a few minutes. These clothes caught my eye on account of the way they were hung and how it just added life to the mill."

This is the last of my summer road trip blogs. For 12 weeks now, I traveled the region's roadways with my camera, bent upon discovery.

Inevitably, visual surprises emerged because they were there and because I was looking, whether the carefree joy of two boys fishing at sunset in the Pine Barrens, or the dignity of Boyertown's military-bear statue.

Click here or on the photo at right for a slide show of some of my favorite "Scene on the Road" photos from the summer. The picture above was taken by my son Jesse at the Ocean View Service Area on NJ's Garden State Parkway. I dragged him and his older sister Madeline there while we were on our way to visit friends at the Shore, and I wanted them to see first hand some of the places I'd visited (That's where I'd met Marvin Katzer of South Hampton/Ventnor in week 10). That's what the blog has been about all summer, a way to share a passion for photography by saying "look what I saw today!"

It has also allowed me to become more connected with you the readers - who like to get out and experience the region and love taking pictures while you're at it.

I plan to continue to blog occasionally, talking with you about photography as we all enjoy our own journeys. For now, it will happen in this same space. So thanks for reading and sharing your photos. cheers, TomG

Lola Fields, like a few other readers, sent in her photos after my final summer road trip column appeared in the newspaper last week. I told her, like the others, that I would resume blogging again soon, and would save her photos for posting in the future.

So here I am, getting ready to post my FIRST non-road trip blog when she sends me a new photo. I find it so amazing that I'm sneaking it in ahead of my own post, as the truly LAST of the summer road trip photos from readers.
But let's go to the beginning - her first email from last week: "I saw the damnedest thing Tuesday morning when crossing 30th Street at Market (Post Office side). They don't get any more 'Scene on the Road' than this."

She described the rat in the narrow pot hole as looking "like dental amalgam," then joked about it being "an elegant solution to two of (Philadelphia's) more notorious problems...axle breaking pot holes and rat infestations." Fields wondered in her email, "if we'd be seeing whole colonies in the larger holes."

Two days later, the rat was still there, so she took another photo with her cell phone. "It has become decidedly convex," she reported.

Which brings us to her latest dispatch from the roads, signed: "Absolutely flummoxed."

"I didn't think I'd have reason to write to you about this again, but a week later I passed the pothole rat again and I'm not sure what to think..."






Yes, the rat is still there. And yes, that's fresh asphalt cold mix patch there as well, applied carefully - and precisely - by hand around the poor creature.

It's been a week since the road trip blog expired, and after spending my first weekend all summer not posting something there, I am back to share and talk about my pictures and newspaper photography.

I shot this photo under the Ben Franklin Bridge while on board the twin-masted schooner North Wind, which belongs to Philadelphia City Sail, a summer inner-city youth sailing instructional program. The picture ran in the Inquirer this week as the Scene on the Street - my weekly photo column. You can find it inside the local section of the city edition every Monday, always in black and white, usually somewhere around page B-8. That's a "contact sheet" below of other images I shot before the published frame above.

It's also, I realized after an email exchange with Philadelphia's Mr. Skyline, photographer R. Bradley Maule of the website phillyskyline.com (he goes by B Love there) that it was the fourth skyline photo I've shot for my newspaper this year. I was talking to him because I noticed the shot-from-Camden skyline photo on his blog was taken on the very same day, at almost the exact same time I took mine.

Anyway, here are my other three skylines, shot from Camden this year (from top to bottom): A really cold snap in February iced up the river. I could have taken the picture from the Philadelphia side, but the wind blows the other way, so it all collected on the Camden side. Then a few months later, I was assigned to make a "magazine-y" portrait of Michael Nutter after his mayoral primary election victory. Finally, in early July, we had that absolutely wonderful week of low temperatures and low humidity with breathtaking blue skies. I was heading to an assignment in New Jersey and could not stop looking up as I drove across the bridge. I just had to get out of my car and take a photo. I ended up, you got it, on the Camden Waterfront once again, where I met a summer-straw-hatted Moses P. Burroughs out walking his dogs under that gorgeous cloud canopy. But that's it for a while. Honest.

That does bring me back to the headline over this post. Is it possible to self-plagiarize? Or is that better known as a crutch? At its most basic, newspaper photography is simply showing readers what somebody or something looks like. But as with any other craft, the best practitioners try to bring their own unique perspective to the task at hand. For photographers, the task is illustrating daily life in the our region.

Finding new ways to show readers familiar situations in ways that will attract and entertain is one of the things that makes newspaper photography so challenging - and enjoyable.

Paraphrasing Ecclesiastes (see the headline) or what one of the thin neck-tied, smoking guys on the the new TV series MadMen might say, there are no new ideas, only new ways of presenting old ideas.

Presented with the opportunity to photograph still one more politician or public speaker at a podium in a creative, yet still informative way, photographers often have to pull something out of our hat. Or photograph somebody else's (hat, that is).

Last week Inquirer photographer David Swanson, covering the 127th annual convention of the National Baptist Convention USA made use of their headgear as he photographed delegates. And the very next day, trying to add some visual interest to my photo of Sen. Hillary Clinton speaking to a similar room of supporters, I stood behind a broad rimmed hat to make my photo. I didn't see David's photo in the newspaper until I got home that evening.

Glad you found me. I'm still not up to my summer road trip pace, and our website just underwent a makeover, and my blog was for a while under the heading: "FOOD & LIVING BLOGS."

During my twenty-some years here, my newspaper has never really been known for our breaking news photography. Even during the "Golden Age" of newspaper photography at the Inquirer (the 1980's) when our staff of almost fifty photographers (we currently have half that number) traveled the world doing month-long photo essays, locally we still usually arrived on the scene after the yellow police tape went up. That was the case this week.

We're working on it though, and the new Inquirer home page will soon have live news photos updated throughout the day starting when photographer David Swanson inaugurates a new early morning shift, shooting both stills and video.

But this past week was still old school Inquirer, when police Officer Richard Decoatsworth was shot in the face with a sawed-off shotgun after a routine traffic stop in West Philadelphia. Thankfully, after surgery his condition has improved and he has moved out of the intensive-care unit. Click on the tiny picture to see Daily News' photographer Jim MacMillan's video for a view of the scene before the yellow tape went up.

Inquirer photographer Barbara Johnston arrived before I did, and we staked out opposite ends of the street waiting for something to photograph. It ended up being the SWAT unit putting their weapons away.

I always tell myself I should have a book handy, or bills to pay, when I'm waiting as photographers often have to do. But usually I just talk to the curious bystanders, like neighborhood resident Steve Ford who used his binoculars (that's him at the top of this post). He had been in the U.S. Army and told me, "doing a basic recon doesn't hurt. You gotta see what's going on or it'll be with you before you know it."

Mostly I take pictures of pigeons. Or other urban wildlife. This day I photographed the "action" around the yellow tape.

Daily News photographer Alejandro A. Alvarez used his telephoto lens and mono-pod to raise the tape for arriving police cruisers. That's Associated Press photographer Matt Rourke on the left, and Officer Brian Lauf from the 9th District at right. He was in charge of this part of the crime scene perimeter.