Scene on the Road

October 1, 2008: Moorestown HS, Brand New Cross Country Course

October 2, 2008: Philadelphia Orchestra Inside...Phillies, Then VP Debate, Outside

October 3, 2008: Pregame, Washington Township HS Football

October 4, 2008: Not With Bruce Springsteen on the Parkway

October 5, 2008: Italian Festival, St. Nicholas of Tolentine Church

I shot these youngsters playing on a hill overlooking the football field before Friday night's Washington Township Minutemen game against the visiting Pennsauken Indians. I've always marveled how at every sporting event I cover, there are younger siblings on the sidelines or behind the stands, playing whatever sport they were brought to watch. No doubt they'll soon be filling those same team jerseys.

Two recent experiences with young people left me similarly excited about the future of photojournalism - a lunch with high school yearbook and newspaper staff members at William Penn Charter and the younger Free Library patrons who participated in the summer's Philadelphia Partnership for Peace project.

The Philadelphia Partnership for Peace is a partnership between the Free Library of Philadelphia, WXPN FM's Kids Corner radio show, The House of Umoja, and the Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia trying to addressing the complex issue of youth violence through a variety of mediums. Photography was the medium I encountered this summer with Suzanna Urminska at the main branch of the Free Library. She handed out disposable cameras to kids, and after talking with them about peace and how they think about it visually, they set out photograph the things that say "Peace" to them.

Click here or on one of their photos above for a slide show of more photos taken by some of the Peace kid photographers in their neighborhoods in Philadelphia.

At Penn Charter, after a slide show presentation - with a lot of the road trips on the rail over on the right - I had lunch with the student journalists. And since everyone has a laptop these days, I also got a chance, along with their classmates and teachers, to see some of the students' photos.

Katie Moran, a junior who shoots for the school newspaper, admitted she has no trouble getting close to people with her camera:

Senior Billy Wagner shoots for the yearbook and prefers to work on composition as he leans toward travel scenics and environmental photos:

Like the future footballers, both students work at their game. Katie likes to shoot film and print herself. Billy shot the lightning while down at the shore, grabbing his camera while everyone else was grabbing cover.

And like the younger kids at the libraries, they all have good ideas and good eyes for capturing their world.

October 6, 2008: Germantown Avenue, Mt. Airy

October 7, 2008: Gallery at Market East

October 8, 2008: Westmont, New Jersey

October 9, 2008: ...They Are a Changing

The Phillies win over the Dodgers in Game 1 of the National League Championship Series kept a photo of the latest drop in the Dow off the Inquirer's front page today, but a quick glance at newspapers around the country shows what it could have looked like.

I put this collage together with images from the Newseum's daily collection of newspaper front pages. It's been this way most days since Wall Street has been on the brink of panic. I go to this site every once in a while, especially on a national story, to either see if everyone uses the exact same photo (this one by the AP's Richard Drew) or whether they all use different ones. Of course, that's one reason newspapers have staff photographers cover the news.

Want more economic photos? There's a blog out there, "Turning the economic crisis into one of those clever internet memes," created by an ad agency art director in Kansas City with pages after pages of...well, the name of the blog is Sad Guys on Trading Floors.

And don't forget to check out our images from the playoffs and individual player galleries on philly.com's new Phillies photos page. It will be updated throughout the NLCS, so keep checking after Game 2, all weekend - and through the World Series!
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October 10, 2008: Blimp Over Citizens Bank Park - NLCS As Seen From Cherry Hill

October 11, 2008: Sign #7, Chinatown

October 12, 2008: Scarecrow Contest, Medford, NJ

As I'm on vacation during this historic week, I can't help but wish I were photographing instead of watching the Phillies on television. Because I'm a photographer, I end up relating everything to photography.

Besides looking in the background for my fellow Inquirer and Daily News photographers, as I'm watching the National League Championship Series, all I can think about is how for the past decade, whenever I give a talk to a camera club or photography students or school newspaper photographers, I am always asked the same questions about digital cameras. "Do you still use film?" and "Does everybody at the Inquirer shoot digital?" So for at least the past eight years, since I was issued my first digital camera by the newspaper (a Nikon D-1 to cover the 2000 presidential campaign) my answer has been a pat, "the Inquirer has been shooting with digital cameras since as way back when the Phillies last appeared in the Playoffs. Anyone know how long that's been?"

It's been good for a least a dozen laughs. The answer, of course is 1993 – the year the photo at the top of this post, by Ron Cortes (shot on film) was turned into an Inquirer souvenir poster. It was exactly fifteen years ago today - on October 13, 1993 - Phillies reliever Mitch Williams jumped up on the mound after pitching a strike out to end the game and win the National League Pennant. They beat the Atlanta Braves 6-3 at Veterans Stadium in game 6 of the NLCS, in one of the team's greatest moments, at right, captured (on film) by Jerry Lodriguss.

So this got me thinking more about digital photography and I sent an email to my fellow Inquirer photographers to verify the story I've been telling all these years.

Jerry could only recall using an early Sony camera, tethered to a recorder that he had to carry around on his shoulder. He said he only used it once as an experiment at a Temple University football practice. The first time he used a digital camera for publication was for the Final Four at the Meadowlands in 1996. He remembers "the paper plunked a Kodak NC2000 in my hands on the opening day of the NCAA Final Four and told me that I was going to use it to shoot with it."

But Eric Mencher emailed me that I was right. He indeed used the "modified Nikon F3 with a huge battery pack and storage unit," during the 1993 playoffs and series, adding, "It was a monster to lug around." He made the front page photo with the camera - of the same Mitch Williams - walking off the field alone after throwing the home run pitch to the Blue Jays’ Joe Carter which won the World Series for Toronto. The very last time the Phillies appeared in the Fall Classic.

The email I sent everyone also got many of my coworkers thinking digital history as well. Photographer Michael Perez, who studied photography at Rochester Institute of Technology - right next door to Eastman Kodak’s World Headquarters. But the underclassmen where not allowed to check out cameras because they where expensive. He recalled, “It was a funny time to be studying photography. Even some of my professors where learning photoshop on the fly." Michael is in Los Angeles now covering Games 3,4 & 5 with Daily News photographer Yong Kim. You can see their images on philly.com's new Phillies photos page.

Michael and Mike Levin both sent me links to stories about Steven Sasson, an engineer at Kodak Co. who built the world’s first digital camera in 1975, in Rochester. On its thirtieth anniversary, he told Associated Press reporter Ben Dobbin his 8-pound “filmless” still camera “was a little bit revolutionary.” It took twenty-three seconds to capture a black and-white image on a digital cassette tape. The resolution? 10,000 pixels. That’s 1/100th of a megapixel.

Sasson was recently honored at Photokina 2008. Click here or on the photo above to see an interview (that’s him there with the actual prototype).

Besides sports, the advantages of shooting digital were also apparent for shooting overseas news stories. Also in the mid-90's John Costello was melting snow and ice over a camp stove for water to mix chemicals to process his color negatives in Bosnia, which he then had to scan to transmit back to the newspaper using his Apple Powerbook G-3 and a satellite phone.
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So when he returned to the region in 1999 to cover the conflict in Kosovo, having a digital camera saved him a couple steps. He recalled having to “to give up my film cameras (forever),” as he was handed a Kodak DCS620. That's him, working on the border in Albania, running everything off a truck battery.

But the Inquirer was relatively slow to totally convert to digital. The newspaper didn’t even get color presses until 1993; photographers then shot color negative film and scanned it. Senior Photographer Clem Murray, who was then head of the department, said “we bought a couple of the old Kodak digital cameras...but they cost an arm-and-a-leg -- $15,000 a pop.” Mike Levin sent me this photo of one of our old DCS 200's sitting on photographer Ed Hille's desk. The strobe was "dried out" a bit too much, in an oven after some water damage - by another staffer. Sarah Glover, who came to the Inquirer’s New Jersey bureau in 1999 remembers still shooting film for least two or more years after that. She has been active in national photojournalism organizations over the years and was surprised that “we were probably one of the last staffs in the country to go completely digital.”

The first large staff to make the switch was the Gannett Rochester Newspapers in New York (the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle and the Rochester Times Union). That’s staff photographer Reed Hoffmann, clearing out film gear there in 1996. The photo is from a history of the NC2000 by Eamon Hickey at - robgalbraith.com - Rob Galbraith Digital Photography Insights. Rob “was dragged kicking and screaming into the electronic age,” when his paper, the Calgary Herald began its conversion to all digital photography in mid-1994. He’s now a freelance editorial photographer, digital photography trainer and workflow consultant, and his website is still the premier online resource for working digital photographers.

October 13, 2008: Germantown Avenue

October 14, 2008: John McCain Town Meeting, Blue Bell

October 15, 2008: Atlantic City

October 16, 2008: Cellphone Cameras, John McCain Rally

To celebrate their 25th anniversary, Vanity Fair magazine’s editors have been making 25 best of lists. Adding to their lists of everything "from book covers and documentaries to parties and political one-liners," they just posted a slide show of their top 25 news photographs, including former Inquirer staffer John Paul Filo's Pulitzer Prize winning photo of Mary Ann Vecchio crying over the body of Jeffrey Miller, one of the victims of the Kent State shootings.

There are many of the usual suspects; the Hindenburg exploding, Joe Rosenthal's flag atop Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima and Malcolm Browne's, Eddie Adams' and Nick Ut's iconic images from Vietnam. But a lot of them are full frame, so they look a little different than the cropped versions we're more familiar with. Maybe to make it more VF-arsty? Like Harry Truman holding up an early edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune with the erroneous headline. This is W. Eugene Smith's version of the scene on the back of his railcar in the St. Louis Union Station as Truman took a victorious train ride back to Washington, DC the morning after his 1948 re-election.

You can also vote for your favorites elsewhere on VF Daily.

I covered both visits by Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain to Montgomery and Chester Counties this week.

I've also been one of those tv viewers switching between the debates and Phillies playoffs the past couple weeks. Unlike the Phils' trip to the post season, presidential campaigning is a scene that is played out every single day, and has been for well over a year now. So while even two visits in the same week are not big news, I photographed them as though they where. I'm also sharing them with my fellow political junkies even though we're not as numerous as those Phillies fans, again like me, who've been clicking all over the excellent slide shows on philly.com's new photo gallery site. (Yeah, that's a plug. The photos there by my sports shooting co-workers are great, and the new and improved web format is wonderful for viewing images).

Plus...it might encourage my assigning editor - in the interest of fairness - to let me cover the Democratic presidential nominee when he comes to town. Stay tuned, hopefully, for a similar post in the next two weeks when Barack Obama returns to our Battleground State.

I joined the traveling press pool on both visits, Tuesday and Thursday. These photos are all interspersed from the two days, which were very similar both in the events McCain attended and the campaign's travel procedure.

The candidate and his staff, the secret service and media all travel in the same chartered airplane. They usually land at the general aviation areas of airports where they all board cars, vans and buses. In Philadelphia, that is Atlantic Aviation - the same place the Phillies charter from Los Angeles landed yesterday morning! That's were I hooked up with them after going through security checks, along with the motorcade drivers.

Waiting on the tarmac for the plane to land was a campaign staffer with coffee for the staff already on board. This was Thursday morning as they were flying in from Wednesday night's debate in New York, and that's Steve Duprey, a close friend and frequent traveling companion of McCain on the right. He is a former New Hampshire GOP chairman and served as a Deputy Permanent Co-Chair at the 2008 Republican National Convention. But he's most known as the campaign's jokester. Newsweek called him "McCain's Court Jester," and he has said he hopes to become secretary of a new federal agency: the Department of Fun.

The candidate's plane, a Boeing 737-400, is an airborne version of his Straight Talk Express bus. McCain sits in first class, the Secret Service agents ride in the middle cabin...

...and the traveling national press corps rides, and disembarks, from the rear. That's Associated Press staff photographer Carolyn Kaster, who is based in Harrisburg, but has been traveling and covering McCain (so she'll miss covering tomorrow's Penn State-Michigan game!). She shot him during the primaries and has rotated coverage with other AP staffers. She will be traveling with him now through the November election. The photographers, reporters, network television and radio correspondents and camera crews who travel with the candidate everywhere he goes reimburse the campaign for their share of costs, including the expenses for hotels, meals, and even the wireless internet connection installed at many events.

Historically, presidential campaigns have used airport arrivals as an opportunity - as in photo op - but also to reward local supporters and politicians with a chance to share the spotlight. Not as good as being on stage with a presidential candidate, but being there to extend a "welcome to our town," still has some cache. On Thursday, the campaign rewarded four Montgomery County volunteers who work out of the McCain/Southeast PA Victory HQ in Blue Bell. They had also attended Tuesday's Town Meeting at MCCC.

A motorcade escort of Pennsylvania State Troopers, in cars and motorcycles, made for the quickest trip up the Schuylkill I'd ever experienced. Not even the Conshohocken Curve or the stretch from City Avenue to Belmont could slow us down.

On Tuesday, McCain stopped at WCAU-TV, channel 10's studios, to do a series of one-on-one satellite interviews with television stations around the country. He was also interviewed by NBC10's Kristen Welker.

Most of the traveling press corps continued onto Blue Bell, but a tighter pool, including me, WCAU photographer Dave Palmer, and shooters from AP, Reuters, AFP, Getty Images, along with reporters from the same wire services, plus Bloomberg, Newsweek, NPR, and the Wall Street Journal waited in a holding room at the station, and watched the senator on a couple video monitors.

Obama supporters came outside as McCain's motorcade traveled along Walton Road past the Plymouth Metting offices of United Food and Commercial Workers International union, Local 1776.

Thirteen year-old Jeff McGee of Hatford came to MCCC with three generations of McGee women; his sister, mother and grandmother.

At both day's events, McCain was accompanied by his wife Cindy...

...and in Downingtown, they were joined by Sen. Joe Lieberman. That's U.S. News & World Report photographer Jeff MacMillan.

October 17, 2008: Greater Mount Pisgah Church of Haddonfield steeple raised after fire.

October 18, 2008: Society Hill

October 19, 2008: Hallway Shadows

$454.8 billion record-high federal budget deficit got you down?

Nothing like a championship hometown team to provide that psychological pick me up.

I felt it when I saw the homemade banner with the red P’s hanging on the fence near Philadelphia International Airport, driving by after the Phillies had arrived back home on the red eye from Los Angeles earlier that morning.

As a photographer this baseball post-season, that bed sheet is about the closest I’ve gotten to Phillies coverage. But the playoffs were so exciting, I couldn’t help talking to my sports-shooting colleagues about it every day. First about the Inquirer going digital for the first time the last time the Phillies were in the playoffs, then just to get some vicarious thrill from hearing about how and what they’re shooting.

So what’s it like to cover a World Series-bound team anyway? I’ve shot exactly two Phillies games since I covered Spring Training in 2002, and have not worked a single game since the move to Citizens Bank Park. So I had to ask somebody else.

I started with David Maialetti. He came to the Daily News in 1997, shortly after I returned to the street, after working a few years as an editor. I remember thinking, “Hey, this kid’s got game,” as I watched him work and saw his images in the “rival” newspaper the next day. Our papers have always been under the same publisher, but have always had separate editorial staffs, and different styles and readerships, so we’ve never really been competitors, but Dave and his fellow Daily News photographers have kept me on my toes over the years when we’d show up at the same assignment.

That will be changing soon, as eventually our two staffs will be combined (as will the copy desks and editorial assistants), and we’ll all be shooting for both newspapers. We started it toward the end of the Phillies season, and a few weeks ago the Inquirer and Daily News newspaper names were dropped from the credits – they now simply read “staff photographer.”

Anyway, that’s Dave on the right, with Inquirer, oops, make that staff photographer Ron Cortes, posing at Dodger Stadium after they arrived for game 4 of the series. They’d both covered the Eagles game in San Francisco the day before.

Dave grew up in Philadelphia, in Lawndale. When he was in high school, he and his younger brother Brian got into a few games during the 1993 World Series. We won’t say how, just in case the statue of limitations lasts longer than Veterans Stadium. So even though he’s been following the Phillies his whole life, he says the importance of their making it to the playoffs “finally sunk in when I was all done sending photos,” after the fifth game.

Dave was positioned in a photo spot above the first base dugout. With him in Los Angeles, was Ron Cortes at third (somewhere in the left photo above), and Yong Kim at first (he's in the right version). For game 3, Michael Perez did some shooting third, and then he went into the tunnels under the outfield seats to edit everyone's photos and transmit back to the newspaper. He performed the same editing duties for games 4 and 5 when the other two photographers arrived.

The elevated spot is someplace photographers don’t normally shoot from during the regular season, so that makes it different Dave said. “But a downside is that a lot of the photos look the same.” He shoots every play as if he were the only photographer covering the game. “We’re all on it, but you never know if someone is gonna be blocked.”

Toward the end of Game 5, when it looked like the Phillies would do it, Mike and the others started preparing for the finish. Ron geared up for the beer and champagne showers, putting on “a cheap poncho, with Mickey Mouse on it no less, a throw away." He also made sure his camera and lens were covered. The plan was for him and Yong to go into the locker room while Mike and Dave edited the on-field celebration photos. Yong was also to be the pool photographer, shooting the trophy presentation in the area Fox-TV had cordoned-off, along with Phillies team photographer Miles Kennedy.

In his elevated spot, Dave was thinking about who he would focus on at the end. He and the other photographers had been talking about how closer Brad Lidge always celebrates every win. “He does a fist pump, and we all have shot similar photos of him before,” Dave recalled as he thought about shooting somebody else. “I decided I would try to follow Charlie (manager Manuel). I stayed on him, even though part of me was looking to see where Ron and Yong were,” as they all ran on the field after the game ended. As Dave followed the manager through his lens, he knew the other two photographers were shooting the players, but he still “worried that I was missing something. I had the manager of the team, but he isn’t really one of the stars. I kept thinking how much he had going on in his life. Manuel seldom shows any emotion, so it was a rare moment when he raised his finger to point to someone in the crowd. Then he went back inside. He wasn’t out on the field very long. He was either going into the club house to celebrate or maybe he was going to start work on their next game.”

Meanwhile, in between editing, Mike had run up into the outfield stands above him trying to make a photo from a different perspective. It worked, as Pat Burrell took off for first, watching his single sail into left-center, scoring Chase Utley. For a real Southern California perspective, Mike got to listen to Danny DeVito cheering behind his third base postition (when the “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia” star wasn't enjoying those World Famous Dodger Dogs®)

While Dave was reminiscing about the ’93 phillies, fellow Daily News photographer Yong Kim was back on familiar turf. You have to use your imagination, but there is a whole set of snapshots of him, posing in this very same spot when was a kid, when his uncle would bring him to Dodger games.

He had photographed at Angel Stadium in Anaheim while working for the Orange County Register, but the NLCS was the first time he’d been in the ballpark as a working photographer.

The Dodgers set up a wireless internet connection at each of the shooting positions, so balancing his laptop and his two Canon EOS-1D Mark II N’s on his lap, he was able to download and then edit, caption and send his photos between innings, instead of using messengers to carry his cards to Mike. “I liked it. It’s possible you might miss good action,” but he thought the tradeoff to be able to instantly send photos of critical plays back to the paper on deadline.” He admits it is more practical with baseball than other sports. The Reuters photographers were set up to upload their entire card directly to an editor’s remote computer. When the game ended, Yong said, all the Phillies rushed out of the dugout and started spraying beer and champagne on all the Phillies fans in the crowd. One of the photographers stood up shouting "Computers! They can’t get wet!!!” Yong said the players looked kind of sheepish, and then moved on. He shot Dodgers shortstop Rafael Furcal, sliding safely under catcher Carlos Ruiz to score a game-tying run in Game 4. That was the one where the Phillies came from behind to win 7-5 and take a 3-1 lead in the series. Back in Philadelphia, he was also right on for another defensive play, Shane Victorino's leaping catch of Casey Blake's fly ball that preserved the Phillies win in Game 2.

This post was starting to get long...so I split it into two parts.

click here for more.

October 20, 2008: Morning Frost

October 21, 2008: Kindergarten, Allen M. Stearne School, Unity and Hedge Streets

This is part two of a post on Inquirer and Daily News staff photographers coverage of the Phillies postseason. (Click for Part One) I was talking to Yong Kim and Ron Cortes about being in the team’s locker room in Los Angeles:

Yong Kim and Ron Cortes were both dowsed in the Phillies locker room during the beer and champagne showers. I already mentioned Ron’s protective gear, but he could have used some eyewear as well, like Pedro Feliz here as Utley pours it on. Ron said he could only shoot for a few minutes because he “got burned in my eyes from the champagne. It also eventually became almost impossible to shoot there as it was wall-to-wall people.”

Jerry Lodriguss wasn’t in Los Angeles, but I had to share this photo of him anyway from LAST YEAR, when the Phillies won the division. Jerry has the distinction of being the only photographer hired at either newspaper here specifically as a sports shooter. He was freelancing for Sports Illustrated at the time, and had worked before at the New Orleans Times-Picayune and for United Press International.

I thought his photo of Brett Myers scoring (with Jimmy Rollins behind him rounding third on Victorino's two-run single) in the second inning of Game 2 was shot with a remote.“Nope,” Jerry replied, “just happens we don’t have any…” He has used them before, and had a wireless remote at one time, but it broke and was never replaced. The Inquirer and Daily News photographers covering the series shot it pretty low tech, and without a lot of gear. They all use Canon EOS digitals, all 1D’s, either Mark III’s, II N’s or II’s. Most just use two bodies. Shooting on the field position they use 400mm f2.8’s and the 70-200 f/2.8. Sometimes for day games they might put a 1.4x converter on the 400. In California, the games started early enough that there was still daylight, but for the series now, they’re all scheduled for 8 p.m.

The single afternoon game at Citizens Bank Park for the NLCS gave photographers a chance to play with the light a little and shoot more than just game action. Mike caught Myers in a patch of sunlight running between first and second and Dave photographed him in deep shadow – at least compared to the sunny stands – while he was winding up on the mound.

I mentioned before the now-joint staff. Both newspapers used Ron’s photo of Lidge and Ruiz celebrating the pennant clinch on the front. The huge photo on the Inquirer’s wraparound “second front” photo was Dave’s. Behind the four shooters in L.A. were photo editor Alen Malott, photographer Michael Wirtz, filling in as an editor, and Michael Plunkett in the color lab. They were the ones here getting everything into the newspaper, and updating it as newer photos arrived from Mike’s laptop.

During the 1993 Series, the Inquirer had brand new color printing presses and was still working out a lot of the kinks, so deadlines were earlier than usual. So early that a lot of home delivery customers received newspapers on their front step in the morning that didn’t even have the final score of the previous night’s game.

No problems like that this time - everybody gets the latest news - except the few Inquirer readers in Harrisburg or Washington, DC. The front page on the left, the first edition, is what the out-of-town readers saw on the Thursday morning after Game 5.

Really different for the playoffs this time is the web, especially for photos. Jennifer Musser-Metz, lead systems analyst for Philly.com and web developer Nadya Harvey had been working on a newer template for slides shows, taking them out of Adobe Flash Player. The Phillies played their way into the postseason before it was completely automated, so Inquirer director of photography Hai Do and media editor Karl Stolleis have been hand-tweaking most of the photos in the galleries on the Phillies photo page. Hai is on his way to edit the game photos from St. Pete.

It has been a huge success. Last Thursday, the day after the clinch, the top four most read "stories" on the website were ALL Phillies photo galleries! Readers looking at Game 5, the fans celebration, the team's airport arrival made up 33.5 percent of the total site traffic.

Meanwhile, here in Philadelphia, photographers were out shooting action as well.

John Costello said he “wanted to do something with live tv,” ever since the first time he saw the high definition video screens in the atrium lobby of the Comcast Center.

John called in advance of the game, and they let him get up in the bucket truck they use for washing the windows. Unfortunately the broadcast format didn’t match, so they couldn’t get the game to show on the full 83 by 25 foot LED video screen and there weren’t very many baseball fans around to watch. But…on his way out he did photograph some fans watching from outside, before heading to South Philadelphia for the victory partying on Broad Street.

At the same time Steve Falk was documenting the fan action in Mayfair...

...and David Warren had South Jersey covered. Steve photographed the police arresting overzealous fans, while John said they mostly had a laissez-faire attitude. Around 1 o’clock in the morning though, he told me they starting saying “hey, I gotta get up in the morning…and so do you. Now break it up.”

Then, with a full week to first wait for Game One of the World Series begins, it's on to feature stories about the fans getting RED-dy!!

Senior photographer Clem Murray photographed Sister Elizabeth Anne DeWaele, who teaches fourth grade at St. Thomas Apostle School in Glen Mills.

Inquirer photographer Eric Mencher just told me about Gen. Colin Powell citing a still photograph in his endorsement of Barak Obama over the weekend. Powell told Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press he saw the picture in a magazine "photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan." I asked Eric if he knew what the photo was. He didn't but said Maureen Dowd had a column on it in the NY Times today. After reading her column, and learning Powell had seen the photo in the New Yorker, I knew right away it was the work of Platon, a part of his portfolio “Service,” about men and women who volunteered to serve in the military and were sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. I was just looking at the whole set of photographs myself just last week.

Powell said it was the crescent and star denoting the soldier's Islamic faith that touched him, and he was troubled by Republican's falsely suggesting that Obama is a Muslim and therefore associated with terrorists.

Wow, I was thinking as Eric mentioned it to me. It's always great to hear about a photographer influencing world events. I have to confess though, I was hoping the picture was shot by some unknown newspaper photographer toiling away somewhere shooting photo essays nobody wants to publish, but are subjects that are important and deeply personal to him or her…

Back in the late 90's while still an art student in London, British Vogue named Platon the “best up-and-coming photographer.”

His debut book, “Platon’s Republic” was a collection of portraits of powerful Americans. The most familiar picture is the one that became known as the Bill Clinton “crotch shot” after it appeared on the cover of Esquire in 2000. The New Yorker also has a podcast interview with Platon about his subjects and his pictures.

As Eric said to me as we walked in the Inquirer hallway, "It shows people do pay attention to still photography and it does matter."

October 22, 2008: New Lighting and Multimedia, the Ben Franklin National Memorial

October 23, 2008: W.E.B. DuBois Mural, 6th & South Streets

October 24, 2008: 2nd & Market Streets

October 25, 2008: During Phillies Rain Delay

October 26, 2008: Can't Resist the Colors

As a lot of the photography I do for the newspaper is self-generated, I often feel like Don Quixote, attacking imaginary enemies – mostly in my own head - when trying to figure out what pictures my editors might want, or which ideas for photos that have a chance of producing a photo that will be seen by readers.

(Speaking of Quixotic quests, click on the image at left for some Eric Mencher photos shot in La Mancha, Spain a few years ago when Cervantes’ book was celebrating its 400th anniversary).

I spent a good part of the day last Friday, not quite tilting at windmills, but in pursuit of something almost as futile – trying to catch the wind.

I was chasing the windblown smoky haze coming from Tuesday’s blaze in the Wharton State Forest.

I am now working a morning “news” shift, shooting for our website as well as the next day’s newspaper. The news radio traffic reports that morning talked about the closing of Route 206 and sections of the White Horse Pike. I could smell the distinctive odor of burning wood as soon as I stepped out my front door, and looking up at the pre-dawn sky, I decided to photograph morning commuters in nearby Cherry Hill driving in as the sun rose through the haze. I could see it, and could tell that it looked different from early morning fog, but I was uncertain if I could show that in a photograph. I ended up waiting near a picturesque “S” curve in the road for a school bus to pass, figuring that would at least convey the time of day.

My colleague Chip Fox had already photographed the firefighters earlier in the week, so that was old news. What was new this day was this haze, drifting throughout the region, the smell reaching as far as Philadelphia. So I wandered along Penn’s Landing, and farther south along the Delaware River, but faced the same photographic problem. I knew it was smoke from a fire forty miles away, but it looked like a normal summer haze. Even looking at everything backlit didn’t help. About that time, I was talking to my editor who had just heard they’d closed the schools in Hammonton because of the thick smoke, and I started to kick myself that I hadn’t simply driven there two hours earlier after I’d shot the Cherry Hill commuters.

As a newspaper photographer I am constantly wrestling with similar dilemmas: Do I wait until an editor decides if we’re covering something? Will I waste time chasing after something nobody else will care about? If I do make a long drive to cover breaking news, when it might be over by the time I finally arrive? Will there be even fewer photographic opportunities if I am sent later?

So I took off for Hammonton, knowing that I can’t take pictures of kids NOT in school, but maybe the heavy smoke would still be there. I could see it off on the horizon as I drive east on the AC Expressway, and after exiting at Blue Anchor, pulled over and made a picture after I drove over the highway.

That’s something I learned years ago as a news photographer – if something catches my eye, I take the few seconds to make a photo. Over the years there have been many cases of “anything is better than nothing,” which is what I would often have if I’d waited for something really good to photograph. That advice works in almost any situation, from snapshots of the kids this week in their Halloween costume - “It’ll be better later when they have a bag full of candy,” to the sun setting over the Grand Canyon – “maybe when those tourists move out of the way, the sky will be even more crimson.” So, if you can take the time to pick up your camera and point it at something, please do yourself a favor: snap off at least one frame before you put it back down. Don’t ever look through the viewfinder and tell yourself, “it’s not perfect, I’ll wait.” If nothing else, you can look back and feel good knowing you were right, and it DID get better. You’ll also have a record or how the composition or light, or action or mood really did improve.

That wasn’t the case this day though. By the time I arrived, the White Horse Pike was open, and while I could SEE the haze, it was only off in the distance – like those shimmering highway water-mirages seen in the summertime. By the time I’d drive to where I’d seen it the haze, it just looked like any other cloudy Indian Summer day.

Then, getting off the main road I drove past Dottie’s clothesline. I passed her just as she was walking back to her porch after hanging up some white t-shirts. In the city you can just photograph people walking by on the sidewalk, but there is no way to do that when they are at the end of a long dirt road driveway surrounded by an acre of lawn. So I made a U-turn and drove up to confront her suspicious glare. I jumped out of my car, carrying my camera as I always do - a visual clue that maybe I’m not a bill collector or presidential campaign worker. We ended up talking for some time, about life in the country, her family, her jobs, my job, previous fires, and about how nothing compares to the smell of laundry dried outdoors.

Dottie had found the t-shirts in the basement and washed them to give to her son. But then added, "He probably won't want them, he's fussy. He'll say 'they smell with smoke.'" And then she had me sniff them. She was right. My jacket smelled like smoke, but her t-shirts didn’t.

But she wouldn’t let me take her picture – even after she removed select garments from the line. I couldn’t use her last name either. Had to promise a half dozen times I wouldn’t. As I finally gave up on trying to convince her with an almost desperate - “I don’t have any good pictures, you’re the only person I’ve seen today that I can connect to the smoky haze!” – she gave me her final emphatic "No."

Then she asked me if could send her some copies of the pictures.

October 27, 2008: National Student/Parent Mock Election

October 28, 2008: Milk, Food Coloring and Soap Experiment

October 29, 2008: Go Phillies

October 30, 2008: Buy Phillies

October 31, 2008: After the Parade