Scene on the Road

Those are words most photographers dread hearing from an editor. Often it's because the newspaper is short on stories accompanied by pictures, and needs something to avoid a lot of gray type on the pages. Those photos are also called "Wild Art."

This week however, weather photos were also news. And at least one of them was wild. Inquirer staff photographer Mike Perez perfectly captured the thunder storm coming in on the cold front Tuesday night that ended our first heat wave of the summer. (Click on his photo to see a slide show of more weather photos by other Inquirer photographers over the past four days).

Even though he was seated at a computer filling in as the sports photo editor, when the storm hit Mike ran outside and photographed the lightning strikes from our parking garage. "The Phillies were down, the Lakers were winning...and I had half an hour 'til my next deadline," Mike told me later. As the storm was brewing outside, he grabbed a camera and lens from our equipment closet. He didn't have a tripod (or a rain jacket) so set the camera on a wall. He wanted to stop the lens down to f/8 at 5 seconds, "a long shutter to let some ambient light from building in and f/8 because I figured that would be the exposure for the bolt of lightning." Well, his pool camera would only stop down to f/5.6, but that was only a few stops over his guesstimation.

Shooting lightning takes a ton of luck (it's not even like shooting fireworks). Mike says he kept his finger on the shutter and "let the camera fire through the entire card and crossed my fingers." Then went back inside, soaking wet, and first moved the sports section front picture - a wire photo of a dejected Brett Myers, before checking his own stuff. For Mike, lightning did strike twice. He managed to get two bolts out of the few hundred skyline views. And even his "second best" - the overexposed bolt version - is pretty darn impressive.

But lightning doesn't always strike when you want it to. Like when your job is to find a "Wild Art" photo. Over the years, my favorite "standalone" feature photos were found when I wasn't really looking for them.

Maybe it's not art, but finding photos when there is nothing going on is an art form. I try to at least make pictures that aesthetically pleasing. When waiting for the "right" person to enter a scene, in that sort of Henri Cartier-Bresson way, I tend to seize on people wearing hats or carrying umbrellas or canes or packages or briefcases or anything to give the human shape a more interesting silhouette.

On Monday, among all the other mothers and fathers waiting to pick up kids dismissed early from Jackson Elementary School in South Philadelphia because of the heat was one with an umbrella. So, of course it was Aneesha Fox and her daughter Jakiyah that I photographed.Then, finishing up another assignment that day, I spotted Dorothy Williams as I was driving out of a parking garage. She was right there under her very cool hat as I inched out across the sidewalk keeping my eye out for pedestrians. She was hugging the wall to stay in the six inches of shade provided by the building. I immediately pulled over. Asked about the heat, she told me, "I'm 81 years old, I've seen a lot worse."

I know it's a crutch. Like shadows, reflections...or like heading to the same old watering holes to satisfy the "We need a weather photo." (remember, that was the title of this post).

Standing in Swann Memorial Fountain in Logan Circle is Justin Maxon, a photojournalism student from San Francisco State University. He can be excused for leaning on this most timeworn of Philadelphia's weather photo sites - Tuesday was only his second day on the job shooting for the Associated Press here as their summer photo intern. An editor suggested the fountain and he advanced the idea by climbing right in there with the kids. What was I doing there you ask? I went to interview people - "is it hot enough for you?" - for an audio slide show that I never completed (am I saying it's a cliché to photograph there, but not a cliché to record sound?). Click on Justin's photo to see the pictures he shot that day.

Sometimes while walking between assignments in Center City, I will invent mental games to keep me seeing things in a fresh way. I might decide to only shoot with a 180mm lens. Or only look at things vertically. Or shoot using the self timer - and either quickly try to find something to point at as the beeping gets faster and faster and faster, or just let it happen.

Tricks like that work even on regular photo assignments. Once, to illustrate a story about crowds of holiday shoppers on Walnut Street, I walked holding my camera - with a pre-focused wide-angle lens - on my shoulder facing behind me, clicking the shutter on repeated counts of three. Step one, step two, step three, click. Step one, step two, step three, click...back and forth a half dozen times on the sidewalks between 16th & 18th Streets. I didn't get nearly as many pictures of people starring at me as you might think.