Scene on the Road

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