Scene on the Road

Imagine millions of Americans doing the same thing all over the country - simultaneously. Something more common in most homes than eating dinner. Should be an easy scene to photograph, right? But as I set out on assignment to do just that last week, all I could think about was what a tough job it always is. I'm talking about photographing people watching television.

Over 40 million people saw Barack Obama accept the Democratic nomination for president on television last week. Inquirer photographer Bonnie Weller photographed the crowd on Independence Mall watching the big screen in front of the Constitution Center. I was in the living room of Stephen and Leslie Pierce, and two of their three children, as they watched this historic event.

Over the years I have included television screens in the background of dozens of my photographs - it really is a ubiquitous part of most scenes of daily life. But every time something significant is broadcast, and every time I've been dispatched to show people watching it unfold on their televisions, I've faced the same dilemma - how to show both people and what's happening on the screen in the same photograph? Like most living rooms, the Pierce's had a television against one wall - and seats backed up against another. Unless you rearrange furniture, or make people watch from two feet away from the screen (neither one an option for an honest photojournalist) it's not gonna happen. So as photographers we have to rely on optical and compositional effects.

The picture I liked best from the evening was one of Obama's reflection on the glass of a framed portrait of the kids hanging on the wall. "It's like he's part of our family," daughter Shelli (now 25 yrs old) said when I showed her the image on the LCD screen on the back of my camera.

As I young photographer I spent a week once, visiting all the camera counters at the K-Mart and local drug stores looking for the proper color correction filter I'd read somewhere I needed, so I could shoot pictures of the tv screen using daylight balanced Kodachrome. When my dad later drove me to the bigger city and a real camera store, a worker there told me to just adjust the color and tint - make it more red, he said, to compensate for the blue-green of the screen. Thankfully he didn't try to sell me a new camera - one with a leaf shutter instead of the focal-plane on my SLR - to minimize the dark band you get because of the time it takes the 525 horizontal scan lines to complete the image on the screen. I had read about using a tripod and shooting at 1/8th second to minimize the banding, but still spent a few weeks perfecting my technique, shooting a roll of film, shipping it off to Kodak for processing, then checking out and adjusting my results when the slides came back, before shooting another roll. I don't know what I ever did with the pictures, but I do think about it every-time I photograph a television screen.

Speaking of presidential candidates, this is John McCain, just before he withdrew from the campaign race eight years ago.

McCain was "unable" to make it to the Super Tuesday primary debate with George W. Bush, so he appeared on the podium, on a television monitor, in Los Angeles from 1500 miles away in St. Louis. (Republican candidate Alan Keyes was also there in person).

This "one station only" model was in my hotel room in Idaho while I retraced the journey of Lewis and Clark a few years ago.

On the one-year anniversary of 9-11, I wandered Center City's high office towers looking for images. This was at the entrance/waiting area of a parking garage.

When President Bill Clinton's Grand Jury tape was broadcast live in 1998, I was sent to photograph people watching in barber shops and Laundromats. Then I was prompted by the onsceen warning - "Viewers are cautioned that this broadcast contains strong language and sexual content" - to make another stop at an adult content bookstore to see what they were watching.

September 1, 2008: Cedar Park, West Philadelphia

September 2, 2008: Shawnee High School Field Hockey Scrimmage

September 3, 2008: School Supply Shopping

September 4, 2008: Archbishop Ryan High School

September 5, 2008: Collingswood Manor Dance Class

September 6, 2008: Shopping Cart Corral

September 7, 2008: Garden Fern

Besides their literal value - showing the who, what, and where - newspaper photographs also serve to break up all the words and make text easier to read (try reading some of those old Civil War era newspaper front pages you see in history textbooks - the ones with sixty two stories all on the front page). Newspaper pictures draw you into stories and add information not included in stories. They also decorate. This past week I was assigned to shoot both girls and boys high school and soccer and field hockey to illustrate the season preview pages. "We are looking for different type of artistic shots," and "we are also looking for any kind of creative shot" were my instructions besides photographing key players and coaches.

If by "artistic" sports editors mean something that isn't action, then I guess I delivered. Although, it's probably more by default.

As I said here earlier during an Olympic post, I don't shoot as much sports as I did in my earlier photographic career at United Press International, or even at the Inquirer when I first arrived here. So non-action is what I usually end up with when I make my occasional forays to the sideline.

Just as the kinds of photos I take every day in my news and feature assignments are not only the result of having a "high performance 10.2-MP DX-format CCD" with "Nikon's exclusive Image Processing Engine," (the already-outdated, Nikon D200) but rather, I like to believe, an inquisitive and aesthetically inspired eye for detail, great sports action photos do not just happen because you have the "12.1-MP FX-format CMOS sensor, blazing 9 fps shooting at full FX resolution" super-latest up-to-date Nikon D3 ($4,999.95). You still need to know which fast person to point it at and when to push the button. That's why I usually end up with after-the-fact reaction photos when I cover sports. Like this soccer picture last Thursday of Father Judge midfielder Jeff Wimsey celebrating the first of his two goals for Father Judge against Archbishop Ryan in a rematch of last season's Catholic League championship. And why I risk blowing my deadline to stop and shoot kids on bikes as I walked back to my car at halftime.

September 8, 2008: East 7th Street, Chester

September 9, 2008: Girard Avenue, Fishtown

September 10, 2008: Comcast Center Elevator

September 11, 2008: Viewing for Slain Officer Isabel Nazario

September 12, 2008: Student Art Sale, Fundraiser at the Union League

September 13, 2008: Front & Arch Streets

September 14, 2008: Ben Franklin Bridge

I shot the actors Liz Filios and Ben Dibble this week during the Arden Theatre rehearsal of their new production of Leonard Bernstein's operetta Candide that opens on Wednesday.

My picture won't make it into the little file we all carry in our memory banks that define who we are and what we all share. But in one way it is just like those images - Iwo Jima, the lone man blocking the tanks at Tiananmen Square, prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison - it freezes time. In this case, the still picture captures that exact moment Cunegonde makes her move on the Baron's bastard nephew, the clueless Candide, before their dreams of a happily married life together are dashed as they're caught in flagrante and Candide is banished from the castle in Westphalia setting him off on a journey of unpleasant adventures and tragedy. Whew.

I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Candide. It was the first piece of French literature I read, and one of the best plays we did when I worked (in the periphery) with a community theater years ago. So I have to wonder if my faith in the power and value of still photography is the same optimism that Voltaire satirized in his novella on which Bernstein based the musical.

The doom and gloom for print media continues nonstop. It is hard to escape from "The Future" if you talk with any photojournalist these days. Everywhere, in blogs, in newspapers, on the web, and among photographers is the talk that still photography in newspapers and magazines is dead.

Maybe it's that Age of Enlightenment philosopher's optimism, but let’s say all that's really dying is the way we think about photography. To quote Brian Storm, who founded MediaStorm, to create social documentary photojournalism projects for new media: "How can you kill something that people will do for free?"

I believe there will always be a use for editorial photography; we just don't know exactly what it will be, because like everything else today, it has never existed before.

One of the new things is so simple that any newspaper photographer should have thought of it. Instead, Alan Taylor, a web programmer at the Boston Globe, created The Big Picture, with huge, dramatic, vivid still photos that fill up your entire computer screen. It debuted June 1 and in its first two weeks almost reached 1.5 million pageviews. It also created such a stir that before the end of the summer dozens of Big Picture-inspired imitators were popping up at dozens of other newspapers - even the Wall Street Journal.

A lot of people think that because the tools are getting better and easier to use that anybody can shoot great pictures, and that is what is contributing to the current angst about photography. Throughout my entire career I have met hundreds of amateur photographers who have had newer and better camera equipment than I've used. None of that has changed. It's still the person looking through the viewfinder that matters the most. What has changed with all the file sharing and easy access is that everyone now has a greater appreciation of what it takes to make a good still photograph. I think readers will want to see - and enjoy - good photographs even more.

One of the photos I appreciated most recently was this Republican Convention stage image shot by Damon Winter at The New York Times. He has done a lot of good work recently, both at home, and on the campaign trail with Barack Obama. But from the first time I glanced at it on the rack in the Wawa, to looking at it closer with the doll-sized Laura Bush, it made me smile. It reminded me of the picture of Nancy Reagan waving to her Ronnie on film at the 1984 GOP convention - with much better resolution on the president's projected image and the size of the screen.

As long as I'm looking at the still photos from the campaigns, Stephen Crowley, the Times' photographer covering John McCain also has a slide show.

I also went back to look at some of the Olympic photographer blogs, curious how many had continued blogging when they'd arrived back home (most blogs ended when they left China). I was mostly struck by how similar and unmemorable most of the images are now.

Someday there will be an Olympics where an athlete will be on the brink of winning nine gold medals, and all the Michael Phelps pictures will be resurrected. But until that happens, what will be the images we remember and continue to see as the China of Tiananmen Square in 1989 is changed by the Olympics in 2008?

I'll bet it's the pictures like this one by Kenneth Jarekce. I came across his Olympic image while re-visiting his blog, Mostly True.

Jarekce is a magazine photographer, someone who has been hired for years to shoot still pictures that will make readers stop at the newsstand and chose the magazine with his photo on the cover. Or read the story under his picture, even though it illustrates something that was on tv, or the web, or in a newspaper days earlier. Because you're seeing something unique he saw, a captured moment often unnoticed by others, some even with cameras.

In blogging about how he is inspired, Jarekce writes, "Every time I go out to shoot I always pretend that I'm doing a twenty page piece for the best magazine in the world. That's the name, BEST MAGAZINE IN THE WORLD." He admits it's not a very catchy title, but that how he gets moving. Remember. It's not the cameras or the technology, but what you see out there.

"Feel free to try it yourself," he adds.

September 15, 2008: Big Sky

September 16, 2008: Cooper River Rush Hour

Sept. 17, 2008: Haddonfield, New Jersey

September 18, 2008: Second-Story Man

September 19, 2008: Tree Limb

September 20, 2008: Yellow House Ball (9 lbs)

September 21, 2008: Last Day of Summer

At home all week taking accumulated use-or-lose vacation days, I was just out for coffee when I noticed a giant wooden butterfly sign and the "there goes that Action News Van" parked alongside the Haddonfield Friends School. I knew immediately I'd stumbled upon the annual parade of Kindergarten "Monarch Butterflies." My kids, who are now both in high school, put on large fabric butterfly wings when they were each in kindergarten, and made the very same "migration" to Mexico, walking in downtown Haddonfield after tagging and releasing the live monarchs they raised from eggs and studied in class. The last time I'd photographed the parade it was as a parent, so I hung around figuring it'd be fun to see if I would shoot it any differently now. What a photographer is thinking about affects their pictures more than the kind or type of camera they use. How each of us approaches a subject in our own way is what makes photography such a form of personal expression. That's where the "Art" part - if you want to call it that - comes from. Even "documentary" journalistic photography leaves a lot of room for individuality. In shooting for the newspaper, I see this in my own work all the time. I can do the same kind of assignment for different sections of the newspaper and will take different kinds of pictures depending on whether they're for business, food, local or features.

Some of the time those differences end up being only how many pictures I take, or how many varieties of the same picture. "How hard am I going to work this?" is a question I try not to ask myself. I like to think I work just as hard for a single image I know will only run one column on an inside page as for a photo layout I hope will carry the entire front of the section.

Beyond the obvious, I wasn't focusing on just one kid - mine - this time. In shooting these butterfly kids I found myself thinking more about showing the group of identical costumes and trying to capture the kids' motion. I didn't stop them and say "look at me," but then I wouldn't do that if I were shooting a newspaper assignment either.

Once I had made the overall photo of the butterflies looking real small as they passed in front of the fire house, I didn't have to keep trying to reshoot that idea. As the kids marched, I tried to shoot from a lower level, at their height to give the pictures more of a sense of immediacy. And as always with kids, it took a look of pictures to get one where they weren't looking at the camera - especially as they pass me crouched down right next to the curb with a camera resting on my knee. Whether it's kids or business people at a cocktail reception, getting your subjects to ignore the camera is the first step to getting the most natural photos . Mostly it just takes time. For the photographer to get into the rhythm of the activity, and for everyone else to get accustomed to the photographer snapping away. It's a lot like nature photography. You stay in one place long enough so the creatures think you're just a part of the scenery.

When the parade was over I ended up back at the school at their Butterfly Peace Garden which has become the central point of the school's environmental education - a patch of Milkweed that Monarch caterpillars need for food and on which to lay their eggs. It is also filled with a butterfly's favorite perennials, so there were still a few of the kids' released monarchs feeding on the flowers. Maybe they were used to being around the kids since their pre-pupation days, or maybe the nectar was so good they didn't care, but I was able to move in close enough to shoot their tagged wings with my macro lens (an otherwise crummy 35-70mm f/2.8 zoom). One of the great things about digital photography is that even basic point-and-shot cameras now have a closeup setting. Moving in closer is one of the best ways to vary your photos. On most cameras it's the little tulip icon that lets you focus on objects within two feet of the lens. Just don't forget to turn the dial back to "A" or whatever, or you'll end up missing photos (like when you leave it on self timer and wonder why the shutter lag is so much longer than usual).

The tags come from Monarch Watch, an educational outreach program based at the University of Kansas. They estimate over 100,000 students and adults participate in tagging activities each fall, and they maintain a website, blog and an e-mail discussion list. Tagged butterflies like the ones from Haddonfield are recovered at the winter roost sites in Mexico, after migrating from all over the United States and Canada. A look at their searchable database shows three Haddonfield-tagged monarch recoveries - including one (Tag Number CHR820) released by the kindergartners in September of 2003 that was found by Umberto Garcia Garcia in El Rosario, Mexico on March 7, 2006.

So I'll be checking there every once in a while to see how Ms. LMU926 (that's her with the fashionable circle tag above) does on her journey. I know it's a she, because one of the first things my kids learned, and the question every kindergartner this day could answer for you was: "What sex is this butterfly?" (males have a black dot on each of its lower wings and females have thicker black vein lines). The other stragglers I photographed in the garden were LMU846, LMU770 and LMU856, another female, at right. She seemed to savor each flower, so I picked her to chase from petal to petal, starring at her on each stop, shooting - and missing - over and over again for so long I started to get light headed, kneeling in the same place, my finger poised for what seemed like an eternity, hoping to catch her in flight with my shutter-lagged Nikon D200. Over the years I have spent an inordinate amount of time waiting to catch balls on tips of fingers, pigeons taking off, leaps from curbs - all those things that help make a "decisive moment." I know they are all just mind games but we all have to do whatever it takes - crossword puzzles, chess, political debate, practice our craft - to stay sharp. It's not just the equipment.

September 22, 2008: Germantown Avenue

September 23, 2008: The Philadelphia Orchestra Outside City Hall

September 24, 2008: Heinz Warneke, The Immigrant. Kelly Drive

September 25, 2008: Ice Sculpture, Four Seasons Hotel

September 26, 2008: Waiting for VP Candidate

September 27, 2008: From the Parking Garage, #4

September 28, 2008: King's Head XXII Regatta on the Schuylkill

Freelance photographer Ken Jarekce with Contact Press Images says he pretends on every assignment that he's shooting for a mythical "Best Magazine in the World," so he can get into the right mindset to make the best photographs he can. And I've talked often (just last week in-fact) about how it's not what's in front of the lens that makes the best pictures - but behind it, inside the head of the photographer. So what happens when your head is working against you?

It has been years since I've covered society news. For a long time our newspaper didn't even have a "society page" and when it returned, we used handout photos from the various parties, weddings, birthdays, and other events. In the past week, I've shot three different benefits, and they've caused me more angst and worry than any recent news or sports assignment. I have been wrestling all week to understand where my demons are coming from in this. Maybe it's the insecurities of my own socioeconomic background, or recent focus problems with my 24-70mm f/2.8 zoom lens (since I'd dropped it a few weeks ago), or maybe because like wedding photography, where you don't want a mother of the bride unhappy with your pictures (or in this case, friends of the guy who signs my paycheck), but I had a difficult time. I did okay with the scenery. That's cocktail hour leftovers, and an art auction at the Union League above, the Four Seasons Hotel below, and a portrait of my former paycheck signer and his wife at left. That's Bob Hall, who retired five years ago as publisher and chairman of Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News and his wife Ronna of Penn Valley on Friday at the Independence Seaport Museum where they received the Main Line Health HeartCenter’s 2008 Distinguished Leadership Award. They were recognized for their years of work - like so many other community leaders - supporting civic, cultural, and educational and other non-profits which rely on the charitable work of volunteers.

While trying to focus my "impact-damaged" wide angle lens in the newly-remodeled, but darkened Swann Lounge at the Four Seasons, I ran into photographer Cliff Mautner. He is "One of the top ten wedding photographers in the world," according to American Photo Magazine, and his studio is right here in Haddonfield, NJ. He was there as a guest, because he photographs so many couples there. He is also among the few wedding photographers sponsored by Nikon, and a self-proclaimed "technogeek," so I grabbed him both for advice and and to commiserate about stand 'em up and shoot 'em party photos. He did help with the lens, but mostly he allowed me to settle down. Still, it's good to get outside your comfort zone every now and again. I was able to finish shooting most of the people on my list, and then concentrate on photographing the hanging ice sculpture in the lobby - the kind of thing I enjoy. Cool photos. And even a pretty good metaphor for Cliff's career.

When the economy ends up wherever the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 takes us, and our $700 billion is spent buying up bad mortgages, there will probably be fewer photographers employed on staffs at newspapers. In a similar time in the 90's, even before he and a few other part-time photographers were let go from the Inquirer's suburban staff, Cliff was "struggling for survival week in and week out." He was more concerned about where his next check was coming from. He shot whatever "Grip and Grin" photos he had to "to eat and feed my family." It was when he began to shoot weddings that he was able to shoot pictures he liked. "If I can make a couple of pictures that I really like in a given year," Cliff told me in an email, "that's all I can possible ask as a photographer." He says that's how he gets through 55-60 weddings per year.

Now, he says his wedding clients, "for the most part, let me do my thing as long as I'm taking care of the compulsory aspects of the day. I shoot for ME. My motivation is to make pictures that really please ME. The byproduct is that they like it too."

I look at other photographer's photos, read their blogs, and listen to them speak. So thanks to Ken and Cliff, I'm psyched now too. Society event? Just let me at it. I'll show you what happened to my insecurities!

September 29, 2008: Morrisville Little Bulldogs (106lbs) at Northeast Philadelphia

September 30, 2008: NJ National Guard Armory, Cherry Hill