Scene on the Road

August 1, 2008: Goofy Friday for Restaurant Staff

August 2, 2008: Sunrise Over 'Shrooms

August 3, 2008: Parking Lot, Cherry Hill, NJ

August 4, 2008: Chinatown

August 5, 2008: The Great Mother Relocating from Youth Study Center

In something I haven't seen since the first Gulf War veterans arrived home, entire towns turned out to send two Olympic athletes off to Beijing.

I covered U.S. Olympic women's soccer midfielder Carli Lloyd (above) in her hometown of Delran for the newspaper, and went to the parade in Haddonfield for the U.S. Olympic track team's Erin Donohue (below) on my own.

I joined hundreds of other South Jersey residents along King's Highway in Donohue's hometown snapping away. It seemed to me there were more cameras recording the scene than I'd seen at other parades there. Not just photographing their own kids, everyone looked like they really were trying to capture a historic moment.

Donohue's star-spangled send-off came just a few weeks after she earned a spot on the team in the women's 1,500-meter final. She rode on top of a fire truck along the same street she ran daily as a young girl.

After the parade, supporters poured out of the stands at Haddonfield Memorial High School to run around the track with her.

In Delran, Lloyd's send-off was even more small-town. An ice cream parlor named a flavor after her - Carli's Cake Batter Cookie Dough Kick - and the mayor gave her a key to the township.

She signed autographs for all the hundred or so kids, and their parents and friends lined up holding jerseys, posters and soccer balls and she posed for photos with everyone.

The Delran HS boys soccer team ran over after practice to see the player who has been described as "capable of spraying the ball to teammates or putting it in the back of the net herself." She was the MVP of last year's prestigious Algarve Cup after scoring in all four games in Portugal.

The U.S. Women’s National Team plays its first game before the opening ceremonies, with a Group G opener against Norway today in Qinhuangdao.

August 6, 2008: Italian Market

August 7, 2008: Ben Franklin Bridge

August 8, 2008: Evening of Champions, Chinatown

August 9, 2008: Utility Line Sunset

August 10, 2008: Break in the Rain

We had near-perfect weather for at least half the weekend. Just like those beautiful days we can usually count on in September or October. Seemed every evening as I turned around, I found myself marveling at yet another spectacular sunset. I aimed my camera both east and west - and even toward the south at the sliver of a moon. This skyline was shot on Friday.

The photo – in black and white – is in today’s newspaper as the Scene Through the Lens column. The weekly column, which began in June, is moving from Wednesday to Monday. It will still appear each week inside the Local section, often (but not always) on page B-2. Space has tightened up, so it will also shrink from two photos to a single image. It will continue to run here on my blog each week.

August 11, 2008: Farm and Fun Center, Lansdale

August 12, 2008: Ocean City, New Jersey

August13, 2008: Soft Drink and Laundry Bottle Recycling

August 14, 2008: Outside the Bar

August 15, 2008: Roadside America, Shartlesville, Pennsylvania

August 16, 2008: Eighth Gold Medal

August 17, 2008: Swim Club Playground

While I haven't made any official road trips this summer, I have driven around the region on regular newspaper assignments, and have tried to keep the road trip spirit of serendipity alive in me.

Even a tour of the massive GROWS landfill in Bucks County provides a unique visual opportunity when something spooks the thousands of birds.

And those weren't the only birds I photographed last week. A real estate assignment gave me the impetus to linger in Jersey Shore towns, and take my time driving home from Cape May.

It's easy to take a detour toward the shore when the light is nice. I had to laugh to myself when I found myself arriving in Wildwood rearing to go - just as most of the beach-goers were starting to leave.

I had to bypass the towns north of Wildwood for another detour - to shoot an assignment for the Daily News. The photo, of the closed Beesley's Point Bridge in Somers Point - is the first I've done since our departments have started working together.

The light was really getting pretty by the time I turned back to the shore, going to Ocean City. The beach was almost deserted.

It wasn't just that they were about the only ones still on the beach. It was all the tie-dye - and the legs on the roof of the life guard stand - that caught my eye. I walked over just as son-in-law John Kaszmetskie rushed to join the rest of the family after tripping his camera's self-timer for their annual group photo. He married one of the four daughters (they also have a son) of Mike and Michele Lill of Berks County, who have been vacationing at the Jersey Shore for over twenty years.

August 18, 2008: Delaware River Waterfront

I have been watching the Olympics all week, getting home after working a night shift just in time to see the big events replayed on television. And every night I end up sitting with my laptop, simultaneously looking at all the photos some of the 1,200 or so accredited photographers from around the world who have already shot that day. I don’t think I watched that much of the games four years ago - I know didn’t I have a wireless Internet connection in my living room then. I can’t really compare, but I doubt there were so many photos available for viewing from so many sources almost live during the Athens games.

The Chalfonte Hotel, Cape May, New Jersey

What I have found though, after a week of looking at so many incredibly great images, is that I started to get bored clicking on all those slide shows and picture-of-the-day sites. Too many perfect jubilant reactions, clean backgrounds, peak moments, weird but effective angles or remote camera shooting positions. And everything is so tight – and perfect.

Before I knew it, I was doing things like trying to find the very best photo among of the dozens of versions of Michael Phelps hugging his mother after the 4x100-meter medley gold - smack dab in the middle of the photographers’ corral.

By then I was bookmarking and reading all there blogs. What a great Vicarious experience for me. I almost felt like I was there. So as long as I had all the links, here they are, all in one place as a resource.

Click on the photographer's names, and let me know if I've missed any (just blogs, not "Picture of the Day" sites or those that require registration). The photos are from different blogs showing the camera equipment each photographer packed. And then, keep scrolling. Below this really long strip of packing photos are two video -showing BOTH packing up here and unpacking in China.

Zach Honig, PopPhoto.com
Vincent Laforet, Freelance
Rod Mar, Seattle Times
Kevin German, Freelance
Dan Powers, Appleton Post-Crescent
Chris Faytok, Newark Star-Ledger
Nhat V. Meyer, San Jose Mercury News
Chris Detrick, Salt Lake Tribune
Jens Dresling, Politiken, Copenhagen (English translation)
Mark J. Rebilas, Freelance
David Burnett, Freelance
Mike Powell, Freelance
George Bridges, McClatchy/Tribune
Kenneth Jarecke, Freelance
Jerry T. Lai, Freelance
Richard Lautens, Lucas Oleniuk & Steve Russell, Toronto Star
Scott Strazzante, Chicago Tribune
Donald Miralle, Freelance
Sol Neelman, Freelance
Larry Steagall, Kitsap Sun
Matt Detrich, Indianapolis Star
Michael Martina, Freelance
Eric Seals, Detroit Free Press
Kari Kuukka, Freelance, Finland (English translation)
Getty Images, Agency
Reuters, Agency
Jeff Swinger, Cincinnati Enquirer
Marc Aspland, Times of London


Click on the images below for two bonus video tracks:

Robert Hanashiro, USA Today photographer offered packing tips as he prepared to leave for his sixth summer Olympics…

…and Contact Press Images photographer David Burnett unpacked in Beijing for his eighth Olympics:

Back to the Olympic photographer’s blogs. They also reminded me of when I discovered Time photographer Bill Pierce’s Nuts & Bolts column in Popular Photography back in high school in the 1970’s. He actually offered real practical advice, like putting sodium sulfite in your Rodinal developer (It was sort of like “unsharp mask” in Photoshop) or gluing two rear caps back-to-back (prevent juggling the caps or lenses when changing). Pierce is STILL doing his column on digitaljournalist.org.

Even when I worked for United Press International back in the late 70’s and early 80’s and covered Super Bowls, World Series, Final Fours and such, the closest I ever got to the Olympics was a World Gymnastics Championship in an off-year. It was the year Bart Conner and Kurt Thomas were the stars, not a single American woman medaled, and Romania’s Nadia Comaneci – after her perfect 10’s in Montreal - was hospitalized in the middle of the team competition with blood poisoning caused by a cut. She and Conner later married and now run a gymnastics academy in Oklahoma (Yeah, I was just wondering myself how to I know that. Don’t ask.)

It also inspired me to blog more myself. Instead of just posting my Daily Photo, and blogging off my weekly newspaper Scene Through the Lens photo, I hope to talk more about the issues confronting daily newspaper photographers. While my assignments aren’t as glamorous as the Olympics, I know there are a lot of photographers who don’t shoot for a living and might wonder what it’s really like.

Finally, besides all the vicarious photo thrills, reading all the blogs was helping me get psyched up for the home stretch of that OTHER once-every-four-years event - the gold medal race to the White House.

I covered the campaign and a single caucus in Iowa and New Hampshire's condensed campaign and First in the Nation Primary, but other than voters during the New Jersey and during Pennsylvania Primaries, I haven’t photographed very much campaigning since. So I was looking forward to traveling to Denver, where fellow staff photographer Larry Kesterson and I would be covering the Democratic National Convention.

Yeah, past tense. Yesterday, three days before we were to fly to Denver, the Inquirer told me and photographer Larry Kesterson that we weren’t going. They also pulled the plug on Eric Mencher and David Swanson going to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul in two weeks.

So I’m bummed. The news probably won’t make Romenesko, where stories are showing up about cutbacks at the conventions, but even within the bigger picture of troubles within the newspaper industry, it doesn’t bode well for the future of photography here. Throughout my newspaper career I have seen the path cutbacks usually take: the “service” departments – the library, copy desks, news assistants, photographers - are always early targets.

So this is MY camera equipment, still sitting in my trunk, going nowhere. Because some of you have asked, I use Nikon. A D200 is my primary body, and I shoot ninety percent of my photos with the 24-70mm f/2.8 zoom. My other primary lenses are an 18mm f/2.8 and 180mm f/2.8. You can also see a 300mm f/4, a macro lens and my secondary body, a D100, along with flash units and a 1.4 converter. I have an old D2H and even more ancient 35-70mm f/2.8 lens I keep as backups. The newspaper has a faster 300mm f/2.8 and other long glass I can use, and they gave me an old 500mm f/4 manual focus lens just to keep in my trunk as a “better than nothing” long telephoto lens for breaking news.

August 19, 2008: Sangria in Old City

August 20, 2008: Delaware River near Raubsville, Northampton County

August 21, 2008: Laurel Hill Cemetery

August 22, 2008: Capybara, Cape May County Zoo

While watching the Olympics, seated in front of the television with my laptop, I ended up with a pretty extensive set of bookmarked links to blogs from lots of great photographers covering the games. The closing ceremonies are a day away now, but I figure the blogs should be up for a while, and will still make for informative and entertaining reading. So here they are, all in one place. Click on the photographer's names, and please let me know if I've missed any (just blogs, not "Picture of the Day" sites or those that require registration).

Zach Honig, PopPhoto.com
Vincent Laforet, Freelance
Rod Mar, Seattle Times
Kevin German, Freelance
Dan Powers, Appleton Post-Crescent
Chris Faytok, Newark Star-Ledger
Nhat V. Meyer, San Jose Mercury News
Chris Detrick, Salt Lake Tribune
Jens Dresling, Politiken, Copenhagen (English translation)
Mark J. Rebilas, Freelance
David Burnett, Freelance
Mike Powell, Freelance
George Bridges, McClatchy/Tribune
Jonathan Newton, Washington Post
Kenneth Jarecke, Freelance
Jerry T. Lai, Freelance
Richard Lautens, Lucas Oleniuk & Steve Russell, Toronto Star
Scott Strazzante, Chicago Tribune
Donald Miralle, Freelance
Sol Neelman, Freelance
Larry Steagall, Kitsap Sun
Matt Detrich, Indianapolis Star
Michael Martina, Freelance
Eric Seals, Detroit Free Press
Kari Kuukka, Freelance, Finland (English translation)
Getty Images, Agency
Reuters, Agency
Jeff Swinger, Cincinnati Enquirer
Marc Aspland, Times of London

August 23, 2008: Playground Sandbox Heaven

August 24, 2008: Blue Diner

It's cliché that most clichés are true. But just because it’s true that kids play in open fire hydrants and the Swann Memorial Fountain in Logan Square during heat waves, I don’t think newspaper photographers should head there every time the temperature hits ninety degrees.

Animals are another definite photo cliché (Especially polar bears or penguins in a heat wave) so as I am always talking here all the time about trying to see fresh ways to shoot old photos and not rely on clichés, I try to avoid them (both animals and clichés) I don’t think I take that many pictures of animals, but a quick review of my Daily Photos shows that’s not necessarily true.

Former Inquirer editor Gene Roberts, who is always described as “legendary editor,” was the man responsible for bringing serious photojournalism to the now-discontinued Inquirer Sunday Magazine. I was the photo projects editor there for three years, when along with picture editor Bert Fox, we produced photo essays every week by the excellent photographers on our staff, as well as freelancers like David H. Wells, Stephen Shames, Christopher Morris, Burk Uzzle, Peter Turnley, Donna Ferrato, Anthony Suau and Pete Souza. Even after winning awards for telling visual stories of domestic violence, the fall of Communism, child poverty and homelessness, at least once a year Roberts would run into me in the hallway, and in a voice that is always described as either a “Southern, low and languid, slow, North Carolina or thick” drawl, would say to me: “You know, Tom, what people really like to see are animals. How about some more pictures of animals.”

People do like looking at animals. And photographers like taking pictures of both people and animals, so we so end up at zoos a lot, because that's where they both happen to come together, often in delightfully photographic ways.

Garry Winogrand photographed at the Bronx and Central Park zoos during the 1960’s. When “The Animals” series of photos debuted at The Museum of Modern Art, Director of Photography John Szarkowski said the pictures showed both humans and the caged animals “exhibiting bad manners and a mutual failure to recognize their own ludicrous predicaments.”

I haven’t been to a zoo in a long time. So after the reporter, zoo director and public relations person left me alone after an assignment at the Cape May County Zoo, I wandered around trying to channel the spirit of Winogrand and that other famous zoological park photographer Elliot Erwitt as I tried to find moms with feather plumed hats or dads in leopard spotted leisure suits.

August 25, 2008: Across Race Street from Franklin Square

August 26, 2008: Penn Metropolitan

August 27, 2008: Discounted Gas

August 28, 2008: Living Room Reflection

August 29, 2008: Black Horse Pike

August 30, 2008: Video Billboard

August 31, 2008: Duck at Fifth & Market Streets