Scene on the Road

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.