Not Quite a Daily Photo (Scene on the Road)

I'm going on my second week of not posting a "Daily Photo" here. Having to come up with an image worth posting each of the 366 days last year may not sound like a big deal, but it really did consume a lot of photographic and mental energy. I'm not complaining, mind you. It honestly wasn't so tough on the days I had photos from assignments that I knew the newspaper wouldn't be interested in. But sometimes, on days off, when I was sick, or working all day in the yard...That really hit me as I wandered around the Mummers Parade last week with my son and realized that I didn't have to do anything with the photos I shot. So I had him snap me with the most non-Mummer non-New Year's Day thing we encountered - a Leprechaun.

Even so, I'm missing it already. Working the early morning news / philly.com shift this week, I waited for the sun to come up so I could photograph the scene at the Kearny school where President Bush was to visit later in the day. After shooting and sending my photos, and starting to drive back to the office, I was looking at the beautiful sunrise thinking I'd be shooting it, if I still had a Daily Photo. So what, I told myself, I can still shoot it "just because."

When I walked into the newsroom, editors were just talking about how the presidential motorcade would be closing down the bridges during rush hour. "Hey," I shouted, "you want a really pretty picture of the Ben Franklin Bridge? I just made one fifteen minutes ago."

They did. A different frame got used on the From the Source breaking news blog.

That doesn't happen often. One of the reasons I started the Daily Photo a year ago was to give me a good reason to keep picking up my camera. Throughout the year, what I tended to do was shoot pictures all day long. When on assignment, I would often see something visually intriguing and then try to compose a photo in the most interesting way I could, even if I didn't think it would work for the newspaper. Sometimes, I would even forget about my blogging "obligation" to produce a daily photo, but later in the evening at home, after dinner and any other household activities were done, I would look through the assignment "rejects," and anything else I'd shot that day and post one.

Here are a handful of those "leftovers" I found while clearing out my files from the past year. These never made it into either the newspaper or onto the blog, usually because something better came up....

(I'm not "guilty" in this first one...I was at a meter sending photos from my laptop, when the cop double parked - South Philly style - right behind me)

Ocean City, NJ