Scene on the Road

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