Scene on the Road

July 1, 2008: Unveiling - Philadelphia Airport's Music Legends Walk of Fame

My summer road tripping has gotten off to a slow start. A scroll through the images as my Daily Photos hits the midway point of the year - 183 photos and counting as of yesterday - finds most of them shot within a few miles of Center City. I have been on an early morning philly.com schedule for most of the year, which means I've covered a lot of press conferences and other scheduled events.

The latest was the unveiling of an exhibit entitled "Philadelphia's Music Legends: Selected Artists on the Walk of Fame." Those are Philadelphia International Airport employees watching the ceremonies before the curtain behind them was opened.

I'm about to begin an evening work schedule for the next three months, so look for a higher percentage of night images showing up as Daily Photos in upcoming Days 189 through 270.

That doesn't mean I won't still be venturing out beyond the suburban streets (this curbside castoff was in Cherry Hill last week).

I'm still looking for your suggestions. So please email me your ideas.

Like from Rosemary in New Jersey, who commented that one thing that always interests her is “the amazing variety of places that you can see the Philadelphia skyline from.” She mentioned driving past a small farm stand in Cinnaminson and seeing "the tops of Liberty 1 and 2 and the Comcast tower peeking over the adjacent corn field. “ She described it as "a totally rural scene with an unexpected urban view,” and wondered what other interesting locations also are within sight of the city skyline."

Photographer R. Bradley Maule who is MISTER Skyline in Philadelphia has made a few photos over the years just like the one she describes. This is my favorite, which Brad says he shot about 2 inches above the Delaware River at Neshaminy State Park, about 14 miles away “as the crow flies.”

Anyone else have any photos of our new skyline from interesting and/or unexpected vantage points?

Here are links to a few more of Brad’s distant, but still-within-sight-photos, along with his descriptions:

From a fire tower in the Pine Barrens (32 miles away).

Above the Northeast Extension in between Lansdale and Quakertown (also about 32 miles).

From on top of the Tidewater Grain Elevator only 5 miles south in South Philly (shot with wide angle lens) three days before it was imploded.

One of my first Road Trip suggestions this summer comes from Cindy White, who lives in Newtown Square. She has three kids and they go to the Elmwood Park Zoo in Norristown a lot, where right next door, she emailed me, “is a bocce court full of old timers who religiously play every day. It's like a little European village has come alive.”

According to their website, the Norristown Bocce League was formed in the mid-90’s after some friends saw bocce courts at the Jersey Shore. So my first Road Trip of the summer will be to see what goes on in, and around the courts – before and after the “pallino” gets tossed. Stay tuned.

Here's a look at the weekly newspaper version of the Scene Through the Lens, which now runs on page B-2 of the local section of the Inquirer every Wednesday. Blog readers might recognize some of the photos from Daily Photo postings, but in the paper they'll have longer captions and comments.

July 2, 2008: Independence Mall

July 3, 2008: Front Street

July 4, 2008: Haddonfield, New Jersey

July 5, 2008: Penn's Landing Fireworks

July 6, 2008: Independence Visitor Center

July 7, 2008: Blue for "BINdependence Day"

July 8, 2008: South Camden, New Jersey

This week marks my twenty-five anniversary working here at the Inquirer. The front page photo on that Monday's Inquirer, my first day on the job, July 5, 1983 was from a 4th of July Beach Boys concert on the beach in Atlantic City. Philadelphia's festivities consisted of an afternoon parade and not much more. Over the years since, as the celebrations here have grown, I have worked a majority of the Fourths, shooting medal ceremonies, summer Mummers, concerts and fireworks.

This year though, with the weekend off, I was shooting just for myself and my friends - and blog readers. Not having to shoot on on deadline for the newspaper, I was able to look away from the fireworks and focus on the crowd filling Penn's landing all the way to the edge of the Delaware River, the last legs of the annual Haddonfield parade, and tourists in Independence National Park (that's them in the print version of Scene Through the Lens in today's newspaper). They each ended up as Daily Photos on Friday, Saturday & Sunday respectively.

The Fourth of July weekend makes it easy for me to remember the date. We moved into our apartment at 29th & Poplar on July 1st, then immediately headed to the Lehigh Valley to be with my wife's family for the holiday. Driving back late Sunday afternoon down East River (now Kelly) Drive there were so many grills fired up that the Schuylkill River bank looked like a scene right out of my fifth grade world geography textbook. I didn't stop to shoot it, my version of Tierra del Fuego - The Land of Fire, on the southern tip of South America supposedly named by Magellan when he saw all the camp fires there.

That's one the reasons I started shooting the Daily Photo. I wanted some motivation to get myself to actually take pictures of all the things I see every day - not just those I think my newspaper might use. It's been fun, and I think It really helps my "day job" as well, keeping my eyes and mind open to more than what will satisfy an assignment. So does changing geography - road trips!! - or going outside regular hours.

Walking out of the Inquirer building on my first day of my new night shift, I looked up at the Drexel University College of Medicine dorms. For years I have noticed the blue light of televisions and computer screens glowing from the windows of hotels, apartments and condos. This night I saw a whole bank of adjacent windows emitting blue. I just had to make a picture. I didn't want to be a peeping Tom, so I figured I'd shoot it from a more oblique angle, from the top of our parking garage in the next block. I shot a few frames bracing my camera on the ledge. It was only when I looking up at the dorms as I was driving out of the lot that I realized - when I saw the blue glow move to different windows!! that I was looking at the reflection of my own Inquirer-Daily News Building - bathed in blue light.

Being creative, thinking outside the box, using both sides of your brain, feeing instead of seeing pictures. All nice mantras, but they don't work at all when can't even tell what you're looking at.

I looked up at the rest of the Center City skyline and I remembered the email I got from the Mayor's office - The City of Philadelphia Recycling Office has declared July 7, 2008 “BINdependence Day” So finally making my blue television glow photo would have to wait for another day. I saw the Ben Franklin Bridge was among the structures lighted blue, so I decided to try to make that my Daily Photo.

Speaking of not seeing things, also in today's newspaper is story about Van Frederick and his black lab co-pilot Bobaji. Reporter Sam Wood asked me about him when a reader called his editor about the guy with the baseball sidecar and dog hanging out in the Starbucks in downtown Haddonfield almost every day. I drive past it often, and I've never noticed him. So I was skeptical. Was he sure she said Haddonfield? Well, it was. But we met him in at another of his regular stops - Cafe Ole in Old City - last week when we did the story (Click on the newspaper image for a slide show with more photos). But now that I'm working on a night shift, and driving into Philadelphia through Haddonfield during the afternoon I did indeed, for the first time, see his motorcycle and sidecar parked outside the Starbucks. A lesson I keep on learning: Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it isn't there.

Keep on looking. I know I will.

July 9, 2008: Rebuilding Camden Schools

July 10, 2008: Upper Darby

July 11, 2008: National Governors Association Meeting

July 12, 2008: Ocean City, New Jersey

July 13, 2008: Haddonfield Fine Art and Crafts Festival

July 14, 2008: Underground Center City

July 15, 2008: The Crimson Pirate (1952)

I talked recently about how shooting a Daily Photo for this blog has motivated me to carry a camera all the time. Well, after almost two hundred days of Daily Photos, I hit a small wall. Walking around the Haddonfield Fine Art and Crafts Festival on Saturday I just couldn't get away from feeling like I was working. Thankfully, I went down to the Jersey Shore that evening, and made my Daily Photo there. On the way home, driving through Haddonfield again after midnight the closed up tents in the middle of the street looked like a Civil War encampment. I went out later to photograph the scene but with the darkness and all the trees, I couldn't quite capture the the feel of being downtown and not in a state park somewhere with a bunch of reenactors.

But I wasn't ready to give up, so I returned after sunrise on Sunday, photographing early morning bikers and joggers. And then inspired by those photos - returned still again later in the day to re-photograph identical views.

July 16, 2008: Moon Over Used Car Lot

July 17, 2008: Affordable Housing Bill Signing

July 18, 2008: Riding Alone After Theft

July 19, 2008: Another Missed Sunset Photo Op (Fourth This Week!!)

July 20, 2008: Windshield Decal

July 21, 2008: Back Door Break

July 22, 2008: Burlington County Farm Fair

I've had Public Art on my mind - and in front of my lens - all this week. Starting with news of the theft of the Native American horseman - half of the two-rider sculpture "Athletes of the Race" - from the empty lot that was once the Garden State Park racetrack in Cherry Hill. I first photographed the pair of life size bronzes - the Indian and the racing jockey running together - for my Daily Photo back in March. Freelance photographer Tom Mihalek had told me about seeing them hidden behind some piles of rubble and demolition debris by the NJ Transit tracks, between the old and new Home Depots on Route 70.

I often send photos back to the newspaper from the Panera Bread there, so I couldn't believe I'd never noticed them before. When I first hiked back to photograph them on that cold day, I hadn't gone twenty yards from the road when a security guard pulled up and started hollering something at me. I just kept walking. It wasn’t very polite of me, but I made him get out of his security vehicle and follow me in all the way to the statues before I stopped pretending I couldn’t hear him. Nobody noticed the thieves while they knocked it down, or even that one horse was missing for almost a week. When the story broke, the developers offered $50,000 for its safe return, but speculation was that it was stolen for scrap. Just the day before I had worked on a story about how the rising prices paid for scrap metal have driven thefts of car batteries, cables, gutters, and even manhole covers. Another reason I was captivated all weekend. Then it turned out that's exactly what happened to the Indian - he was cut up and sold. The $500,000 statue paying out $3,900 as scrap.

The sculptures were created by Thomas Schomberg, which gives me an excuse to post the links to two more of my slide shows on another well-known public piece (Please click on the photos above). Schomberg is the very same artist who made the Rocky statute - originally a prop for the second movie sequel - now standing below the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Next up my on week of Public Art was a visit to the Northern Liberties studio of modern glass artist Ray King. Until I drove up Third Street, I had completely forgotten I'd met and photographed him almost ten years ago with he installed The Beacons, at Broad and Washington - as the entry to the Avenue of the Arts. King specializes in working with high tech film coatings on glass that bend, or split, light wavelengths into a wide spectrum of brilliant colors.He creates site-specific Public Art projects all over the world, but just put up a new piece here, called Hello David – an homage to 18th-century Philadelphia inventor David Rittenhouse who played with light-diffraction two hundred years ago. It went up on the day after the summer solstice, in honor of Rittenhouse's astronomical work. Inquirer critic Inga Saffron did the story on Sunday. I photographed him and his work twice on Friday. First in the afternoon, after checking with him to see what time the light works best on it, and then after shooting a housing story in Camden and Olympic soccer player Carli Lloyd in Delran, I drove back to Philadelphia

When I first called about taking photos, Ray was in Utah working on a new piece there. His wife Debbie had told me that the work, on the outside wall of his studio, overlooking a deck on their adjacent home, looked great illuminated at night. So since I am on the night shift, I knew I would be returning to take more shots of the wall. In the midday sun, it was almost too brilliant to look at. While shooting close-ups of the individual glass triangles, I noticed Ray’s reflection in a few – the ones off axis with the sun – and tried to capture what the selective focus of my eyes and brain were seeing. So by opening my lens up and focusing past the textured surface of the glass, I came close to making his reflection sharp without the triangles getting too distracting. At twilight, I knew I only had a few minutes to shoot him, and I thought, for just a second, that I would have Debbie hold a small strobe aimed at his face up on the roof top deck, which I could trigger from my camera on the street below. It would be a dramatic portrait. But as I looked up at the position of Ray standing on the roof, I almost immediately determined I would silhouette him against the work rather than have him distract from it. Do you think I did the right thing? How would you have photographed him and his artwork?

Then, still speaking of public art, even if it was only briefly public, there was Alex Irvine, last seen in this blog, and in the Scene Through the Lens newspaper column pushing his life size sculpture through Center City.

He recently emailed me to report it was just sold for a price greater than its weight in scrap metal (although it's made of stoneware ceramic). He says it was sold and installed in the person's house in less than a week of his taking it to the gallery. He also said he would be making another volcanic meditating figure for Chicago's SOFA - International Exposition of Sculpture Objects and Functional Art - Expo in Chicago in November. This is the time exposure photo Alex was making of the piece seated near City Hall when I first saw him.

Finally, in today's newspaper, a few older pieces, destined to become part of a new Public Art work someday. The demolition of the Race Street Firehouse - the last building remaining on the footprint - began yesterday.

For years as I walked from the Inquirer offices to Center City I’d admired the firefighting gargoyles above the big doors of the Italian Renaissance/Medieval Gothic castle designed by J. Molitor, the city's chief architect. It stood guard since 1925 and was a historic building until the Historical Commission decertified it last year.

The Pennsylvania Department of General Services, the state agency overseeing the expansion of the Pennsylvania Convention Center, removed the gargoyles and other decorative features of the building before the demolition. They’ve promised all the adornments - six gargoyles, six columns, two coats of arms/seals, the cornerstone, two doors with ornamental pilasters, and two fireplaces - will be displayed inside the new Convention Center when it is completed.

It was the DGS that knocked down the two historic facades on North Broad Street last year – at 6am on the Saturday before Christmas - in defiance of a protection ruling issued two days earlier by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

July 23, 2008: It's Still Humid

July 24, 2008: Ocean City, New Jersey

July 25, 2008: Removed by PSPCA in Raid at Puppy Mill

July 26, 2008: Schuylkill River

July 27, 2008: Summer Storm

July 28, 2008: Power, and Freezer Still Out

July 29, 2008: Jersey Tomatoes - Never a Threat

I was down the shore in Avalon last week photographing an updated cottage for the Home and Design section. The sky was so blue I couldn't stop looking up at it, After editing and sending my photos from the Avalon library I was heading north on the Garden State Parkway when I just had to exit at Ocean City, the light was getting so beautiful. I shot the boats just as an excuse to photograph that sky. And them wandered around the edges of the boardwalk where I made that day's Daily Photo.

Finally I had to head for home, and on the AC Expressway, came around a bend just as the sun was setting directly in front of me. After making sure there were no other cars near me, I grabbed my camera and clicked off a frame.

Then focusing again on my driving (which we should always be doing while behind the wheel), I squirted the windshield with washer fluid as the direct sun was glaring off the dead bugs. At that moment, I just had to reach for my camera on the front seat a second time - but as evidence I was concentrating more on my driving, I didn't even readjust the focus from infinity - and made another shot.

That is the overall theme of this blog, and why it is still called Scene on the Road, even though last summer's road trips are almost a faded memory. Photograph the journey - not just the destination. That means taking your camera out every day and making pictures, not just your usual moments - vacations, birthday parties, soccer games or ebay sale items - but give the rest of your day a shot as well.

As students we are told to keep a daily journal. I had an English Literature teacher who said, "if you don't write, how can you know what you're feeling?" She often added, for the benefit of those who struggled, "if you can't write it, how do you know it's real?" I work with a lot of reporters and they ALL write all the time - and not just for the newspaper - in blogs, magazine articles, and books. I've always admired photographers like Inquirer staffer Eric Mencher and soon-to-be co-worker Daily News Photographer David Maialetti who seem to have their cameras with them all the time. And use them.


I could never write (or compose music or poetry, or dance or sing either) so years ago I started taking pictures to express myself. At some point, I started taking fewer photos of everyday things concentrating on making images to get and then keep a job. So the time I've spent on my blog - shooting the Daily Photo has reconnected me with that every day kind of photography.

During last weekend's storm, I tried to photograph the lightning, but because of the clouds and all the trees in my neighborhood, I couldn't see a thing except brief flashes where the leaves would light up. Besides, it was scary. So I waited inside until the thunder stopped. It was still raining when I went back outside looking for pictures. I found one in the surface of my small patio pond. Then the power went out, and we were forced to eat all the ice cream in the freezer. Hours later, when everyone had gone to bed, I was still watching the flickering candle, wondering how I could capture the outage.

July 30, 2008: Manayunk Canal

July 31, 2008: Town Send Off for Olympic Runner Erin Donahue