Scene on the Road

My weekly newspaper Scene on the Street photo is being replaced by a new Scene Through the Lens column. Each week from now on, I will be visually exploring the situations, circumstance and happenstance I encounter in the pursuit of pictures for the daily newspaper - and talking about them. One or two photos will run on page 2 of the Inquirer's local section every Wednesday, and I will post more photos - and invite your comments - here on my blog.

Today I covered my third election in New Jersey since the beginning of the year.

A lot of what newspaper photographers shoot is the same scene over and over - a Ground Hog Day of news conferences, business portraits and weather photos. The voters of New Jersey can't be blamed for feeling the same way, today's primary being their fourth or fifth election since the beginning of the year.

Approaching the poll entrance at Cherry Hill High School West, I noticed the handwritten signs on the door, and the reflected American flag. I tried to look at it all from a different perspective as well, shooting the same voter sign and American flag from both inside -and outside the window.

I really didn't want to just keep shooting the same photos all over again. I remember during the presidential primary in February trying to find a list somewhere of all the polling places in Camden County, but each municipality had a different way of listing them - not all in one place.

Today, as then, I ended up driving, past schools, churches, libraries and firehouses looking for American flags that looked either brand new, or flying from poles that didn't appear permanent. I found it surprising easy to spot them - even with the proliferation and popularity of American flags since September 11. Like the one here outside Haddonfield Middle School. When I showed up in the morning with reporter Sam Wood to interview voters, it was planted at an angle right next to a sidewalk, almost as if dipped.

I waited for someone to walk under it, but there were even fewer pedestrians than voters, and Maureen Dodson was the only person so pass, with her dog Ruby - but she walked around the flag. So I made a mental note to return when school let out, figuring the kids would have no qualms about walking under it.

Speaking of elections, watching both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on television tonight I couldn't help but think about New Jersey moving its presidential primary up to February. If they'd left it alone, both candidates would be finishing up their primary campaigns here today instead of in South Dakota and Montana.

So now the signs in the Haddonfield front yard of Mike and Carol Harkins tell the story of our next election - the big one in November.

Those are words most photographers dread hearing from an editor. Often it's because the newspaper is short on stories accompanied by pictures, and needs something to avoid a lot of gray type on the pages. Those photos are also called "Wild Art."

This week however, weather photos were also news. And at least one of them was wild. Inquirer staff photographer Mike Perez perfectly captured the thunder storm coming in on the cold front Tuesday night that ended our first heat wave of the summer. (Click on his photo to see a slide show of more weather photos by other Inquirer photographers over the past four days).

Even though he was seated at a computer filling in as the sports photo editor, when the storm hit Mike ran outside and photographed the lightning strikes from our parking garage. "The Phillies were down, the Lakers were winning...and I had half an hour 'til my next deadline," Mike told me later. As the storm was brewing outside, he grabbed a camera and lens from our equipment closet. He didn't have a tripod (or a rain jacket) so set the camera on a wall. He wanted to stop the lens down to f/8 at 5 seconds, "a long shutter to let some ambient light from building in and f/8 because I figured that would be the exposure for the bolt of lightning." Well, his pool camera would only stop down to f/5.6, but that was only a few stops over his guesstimation.

Shooting lightning takes a ton of luck (it's not even like shooting fireworks). Mike says he kept his finger on the shutter and "let the camera fire through the entire card and crossed my fingers." Then went back inside, soaking wet, and first moved the sports section front picture - a wire photo of a dejected Brett Myers, before checking his own stuff. For Mike, lightning did strike twice. He managed to get two bolts out of the few hundred skyline views. And even his "second best" - the overexposed bolt version - is pretty darn impressive.

But lightning doesn't always strike when you want it to. Like when your job is to find a "Wild Art" photo. Over the years, my favorite "standalone" feature photos were found when I wasn't really looking for them.

Maybe it's not art, but finding photos when there is nothing going on is an art form. I try to at least make pictures that aesthetically pleasing. When waiting for the "right" person to enter a scene, in that sort of Henri Cartier-Bresson way, I tend to seize on people wearing hats or carrying umbrellas or canes or packages or briefcases or anything to give the human shape a more interesting silhouette.

On Monday, among all the other mothers and fathers waiting to pick up kids dismissed early from Jackson Elementary School in South Philadelphia because of the heat was one with an umbrella. So, of course it was Aneesha Fox and her daughter Jakiyah that I photographed.Then, finishing up another assignment that day, I spotted Dorothy Williams as I was driving out of a parking garage. She was right there under her very cool hat as I inched out across the sidewalk keeping my eye out for pedestrians. She was hugging the wall to stay in the six inches of shade provided by the building. I immediately pulled over. Asked about the heat, she told me, "I'm 81 years old, I've seen a lot worse."

I know it's a crutch. Like shadows, reflections...or like heading to the same old watering holes to satisfy the "We need a weather photo." (remember, that was the title of this post).

Standing in Swann Memorial Fountain in Logan Circle is Justin Maxon, a photojournalism student from San Francisco State University. He can be excused for leaning on this most timeworn of Philadelphia's weather photo sites - Tuesday was only his second day on the job shooting for the Associated Press here as their summer photo intern. An editor suggested the fountain and he advanced the idea by climbing right in there with the kids. What was I doing there you ask? I went to interview people - "is it hot enough for you?" - for an audio slide show that I never completed (am I saying it's a cliché to photograph there, but not a cliché to record sound?). Click on Justin's photo to see the pictures he shot that day.

Sometimes while walking between assignments in Center City, I will invent mental games to keep me seeing things in a fresh way. I might decide to only shoot with a 180mm lens. Or only look at things vertically. Or shoot using the self timer - and either quickly try to find something to point at as the beeping gets faster and faster and faster, or just let it happen.

Tricks like that work even on regular photo assignments. Once, to illustrate a story about crowds of holiday shoppers on Walnut Street, I walked holding my camera - with a pre-focused wide-angle lens - on my shoulder facing behind me, clicking the shutter on repeated counts of three. Step one, step two, step three, click. Step one, step two, step three, click...back and forth a half dozen times on the sidewalks between 16th & 18th Streets. I didn't get nearly as many pictures of people starring at me as you might think.

Here's your chance to tell an Inquirer photographer where to go.

I'm ready to hit the road again. It won't be the regular weekly road trips for the newspaper this summer, like I did last year, but I still want to explore the region occasionally.

I received many photographs from readers last summer, and many suggestions of places I should visit, so that's exactly what I'll be doing: Driving to the places you send me.

Last summer Ann Spaeth of Miquon sent me some of her photos of old covered bridges in Lehigh County, including this one of Rex's Bridge (1858) over Jordan Creek.

She suggested I check them out, as did Drexel economics professor Roger A. McCain, who told me it was the "pictorial appeal" of the bridges that first hooked him, but in the true spirit of the summer Road Trip, they provided him a "fun reason for a drive in the country."

Still true (even with gasoline costing over $4. per gallon) and I intend to take them up on their suggestion.

This is exactly the kind of serendipity I already enjoy working on the streets of Philadelphia. On Tuesday, I stumbled across a just-graduated (B.F.A., crafts) artist outside City Hall yesterday.

I was covering two different press conferences there and in between, I passed Alex Irvine, 22, of South Philadelphia who had his camera on a tripod pointed toward a "black stoneware" ceramic sculpture. I asked him about it, made a few photos of him and the reactions of passersby before I had to move on. He was still there after I finished the second press conference, so I shot more photos, and then, when he had finished, I followed him as he pushed his "self portrait" toward the University of the Arts.

I will continue to celebrate and share scenes like this, which serve to remind us to enjoy the journey - even one just a few blocks down South Broad with a 150-pound work of art - rather than focusing on the destination.

Click on the links here, here, here and here to revisit some readers photos from last year. I look forward to posting more here this summer as well. Like last year, please send them to me as jpeg attachments, in an email to roadtrip@phillynews.com

I spent three hours on South Street last Thursday morning photographing the construction/demolition of the sidewalks for a story by Inquirer reporter Sam Wood about the current impact of the future improvements.

The twelve quarters in the parking meter was the best $3 I've spent in a while (okay, I bought a couple cups of coffee too). It was a beautiful day. Nice light, not too hot, not too humid. Everybody - except one lady in a Lexus, in a big hurry, who was honking her horn at the workers when traffic wasn't moving fast enough for her - was in a great mood.

Sometimes I am having so much fun meeting people, recording the things I'm seeing, making photos that I can share with readers, I take many more photos than I know will ever get into the newspaper. This was that kind of day.

I began the morning at Jen Melchiondo's Bean Cafe in the 600 block. Customer Bridget Huffman arrived shortly after I did, and I photographed construction worker Ruy Matos holding the door for her as she left the cafe, crossing on one of the wooden gangways running from the street to the storefronts over a temporarily nonexistent sidewalk.

Jen has weathered a lot in the eleven years she's owned the cafe. Like the time Starbucks parked a truck in front of her place and handed out free samples of their product for a few weeks. I photographed her behind the counter as contractor Joe Strozzieri told her they'll soon have to completely shut down her business for a while, as they need to cover an old unused basement entrance right under her front door.

With Sam spending most of his time on the street at the Bean, I knew editors would be looking for an overall view of the cafe. Something what would include as many elements - heavy construction equipment, dirt, traffic barriers, warning signs - as possible. I always try to remember this most basic of photo assignment marching orders, and I always devote a lot of attention to making my "overall scene" as visually interesting as I can.

I've learned over the years it that no matter what else I shoot, if the newspaper uses only one picture, that's what it will be (unless there's only enough room for something small, then it'll be a photo of someone quoted in the text). The north side of South Street was still in shadows when I photographed a cell-phoning pedestrian, which worked as a picture, but I told myself I'll come back later and re-work it.

Yeah, right. Another thing I've learned about myself. I have a short attention span. By the time the light was better for the Bean storefront, I was looking at Matos and Strozzieri (that's him, stripped down to his t-shirt now, but still his in cap) and their coworkers through the orange mesh. I never made it back to the Bean, and that original photo was the one readers saw in their morning paper.

I had seen at least three different utility crews on the job, heads at sidewalk/street level, over the past month. None of those previous situations made a picture, so when I saw PECO guys Dave Mathews (his real name) and William Hempsey (the subterranean one), I was anxious to have the picture work this time.

But whenever Hempsey's hard hat popped up there weren't any pedestrians walking by, and whenever people did pass, he was either underground, or blocking his own face.

Two other things I really needed to capture for the story were not longer there - and that was exactly the point. The 300 block had for years been the leafiest on the street.

The "gum tree" in front of Ishkabibble's was even one of the highlights on Ride the Ducks tours. The trunk of the massive oak had been plastered with used chewing gum as high as anyone could reach.

I shot what was left of it every-which way I could, but the more conventional version proved to be more easily read. The one where I held the camera out at arm's length and aimed straight down, was just plain hard to figure out. But I still like the picture.

For the second "not there anymore" image I wanted to show the sky above the long-shaded TLA, which was now open for the first time in decades as the canopy of trees was removed. I was shooting from a real low angle with a fill-flash to open up the marquee which was in shadows when a 15-year-old boy stopped and struck a pose. I shot him with the flash still on, just to make him feel good. Then I suddenly realized his cap and body posture made a good looking silhouette there in the shadows. So I turned off the strobe and shot him again.

My summer road tripping has gotten off to a slow start. A scroll through the images as my Daily Photos hits the midway point of the year - 183 photos and counting as of yesterday - finds most of them shot within a few miles of Center City. I have been on an early morning philly.com schedule for most of the year, which means I've covered a lot of press conferences and other scheduled events.

The latest was the unveiling of an exhibit entitled "Philadelphia's Music Legends: Selected Artists on the Walk of Fame." Those are Philadelphia International Airport employees watching the ceremonies before the curtain behind them was opened.

I'm about to begin an evening work schedule for the next three months, so look for a higher percentage of night images showing up as Daily Photos in upcoming Days 189 through 270.

That doesn't mean I won't still be venturing out beyond the suburban streets (this curbside castoff was in Cherry Hill last week).

I'm still looking for your suggestions. So please email me your ideas.

Like from Rosemary in New Jersey, who commented that one thing that always interests her is “the amazing variety of places that you can see the Philadelphia skyline from.” She mentioned driving past a small farm stand in Cinnaminson and seeing "the tops of Liberty 1 and 2 and the Comcast tower peeking over the adjacent corn field. “ She described it as "a totally rural scene with an unexpected urban view,” and wondered what other interesting locations also are within sight of the city skyline."

Photographer R. Bradley Maule who is MISTER Skyline in Philadelphia has made a few photos over the years just like the one she describes. This is my favorite, which Brad says he shot about 2 inches above the Delaware River at Neshaminy State Park, about 14 miles away “as the crow flies.”

Anyone else have any photos of our new skyline from interesting and/or unexpected vantage points?

Here are links to a few more of Brad’s distant, but still-within-sight-photos, along with his descriptions:

From a fire tower in the Pine Barrens (32 miles away).

Above the Northeast Extension in between Lansdale and Quakertown (also about 32 miles).

From on top of the Tidewater Grain Elevator only 5 miles south in South Philly (shot with wide angle lens) three days before it was imploded.

One of my first Road Trip suggestions this summer comes from Cindy White, who lives in Newtown Square. She has three kids and they go to the Elmwood Park Zoo in Norristown a lot, where right next door, she emailed me, “is a bocce court full of old timers who religiously play every day. It's like a little European village has come alive.”

According to their website, the Norristown Bocce League was formed in the mid-90’s after some friends saw bocce courts at the Jersey Shore. So my first Road Trip of the summer will be to see what goes on in, and around the courts – before and after the “pallino” gets tossed. Stay tuned.

Here's a look at the weekly newspaper version of the Scene Through the Lens, which now runs on page B-2 of the local section of the Inquirer every Wednesday. Blog readers might recognize some of the photos from Daily Photo postings, but in the paper they'll have longer captions and comments.

This week marks my twenty-five anniversary working here at the Inquirer. The front page photo on that Monday's Inquirer, my first day on the job, July 5, 1983 was from a 4th of July Beach Boys concert on the beach in Atlantic City. Philadelphia's festivities consisted of an afternoon parade and not much more. Over the years since, as the celebrations here have grown, I have worked a majority of the Fourths, shooting medal ceremonies, summer Mummers, concerts and fireworks.

This year though, with the weekend off, I was shooting just for myself and my friends - and blog readers. Not having to shoot on on deadline for the newspaper, I was able to look away from the fireworks and focus on the crowd filling Penn's landing all the way to the edge of the Delaware River, the last legs of the annual Haddonfield parade, and tourists in Independence National Park (that's them in the print version of Scene Through the Lens in today's newspaper). They each ended up as Daily Photos on Friday, Saturday & Sunday respectively.

The Fourth of July weekend makes it easy for me to remember the date. We moved into our apartment at 29th & Poplar on July 1st, then immediately headed to the Lehigh Valley to be with my wife's family for the holiday. Driving back late Sunday afternoon down East River (now Kelly) Drive there were so many grills fired up that the Schuylkill River bank looked like a scene right out of my fifth grade world geography textbook. I didn't stop to shoot it, my version of Tierra del Fuego - The Land of Fire, on the southern tip of South America supposedly named by Magellan when he saw all the camp fires there.

That's one the reasons I started shooting the Daily Photo. I wanted some motivation to get myself to actually take pictures of all the things I see every day - not just those I think my newspaper might use. It's been fun, and I think It really helps my "day job" as well, keeping my eyes and mind open to more than what will satisfy an assignment. So does changing geography - road trips!! - or going outside regular hours.

Walking out of the Inquirer building on my first day of my new night shift, I looked up at the Drexel University College of Medicine dorms. For years I have noticed the blue light of televisions and computer screens glowing from the windows of hotels, apartments and condos. This night I saw a whole bank of adjacent windows emitting blue. I just had to make a picture. I didn't want to be a peeping Tom, so I figured I'd shoot it from a more oblique angle, from the top of our parking garage in the next block. I shot a few frames bracing my camera on the ledge. It was only when I looking up at the dorms as I was driving out of the lot that I realized - when I saw the blue glow move to different windows!! that I was looking at the reflection of my own Inquirer-Daily News Building - bathed in blue light.

Being creative, thinking outside the box, using both sides of your brain, feeing instead of seeing pictures. All nice mantras, but they don't work at all when can't even tell what you're looking at.

I looked up at the rest of the Center City skyline and I remembered the email I got from the Mayor's office - The City of Philadelphia Recycling Office has declared July 7, 2008 “BINdependence Day” So finally making my blue television glow photo would have to wait for another day. I saw the Ben Franklin Bridge was among the structures lighted blue, so I decided to try to make that my Daily Photo.

Speaking of not seeing things, also in today's newspaper is story about Van Frederick and his black lab co-pilot Bobaji. Reporter Sam Wood asked me about him when a reader called his editor about the guy with the baseball sidecar and dog hanging out in the Starbucks in downtown Haddonfield almost every day. I drive past it often, and I've never noticed him. So I was skeptical. Was he sure she said Haddonfield? Well, it was. But we met him in at another of his regular stops - Cafe Ole in Old City - last week when we did the story (Click on the newspaper image for a slide show with more photos). But now that I'm working on a night shift, and driving into Philadelphia through Haddonfield during the afternoon I did indeed, for the first time, see his motorcycle and sidecar parked outside the Starbucks. A lesson I keep on learning: Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it isn't there.

Keep on looking. I know I will.

I talked recently about how shooting a Daily Photo for this blog has motivated me to carry a camera all the time. Well, after almost two hundred days of Daily Photos, I hit a small wall. Walking around the Haddonfield Fine Art and Crafts Festival on Saturday I just couldn't get away from feeling like I was working. Thankfully, I went down to the Jersey Shore that evening, and made my Daily Photo there. On the way home, driving through Haddonfield again after midnight the closed up tents in the middle of the street looked like a Civil War encampment. I went out later to photograph the scene but with the darkness and all the trees, I couldn't quite capture the the feel of being downtown and not in a state park somewhere with a bunch of reenactors.

But I wasn't ready to give up, so I returned after sunrise on Sunday, photographing early morning bikers and joggers. And then inspired by those photos - returned still again later in the day to re-photograph identical views.

I've had Public Art on my mind - and in front of my lens - all this week. Starting with news of the theft of the Native American horseman - half of the two-rider sculpture "Athletes of the Race" - from the empty lot that was once the Garden State Park racetrack in Cherry Hill. I first photographed the pair of life size bronzes - the Indian and the racing jockey running together - for my Daily Photo back in March. Freelance photographer Tom Mihalek had told me about seeing them hidden behind some piles of rubble and demolition debris by the NJ Transit tracks, between the old and new Home Depots on Route 70.

I often send photos back to the newspaper from the Panera Bread there, so I couldn't believe I'd never noticed them before. When I first hiked back to photograph them on that cold day, I hadn't gone twenty yards from the road when a security guard pulled up and started hollering something at me. I just kept walking. It wasn’t very polite of me, but I made him get out of his security vehicle and follow me in all the way to the statues before I stopped pretending I couldn’t hear him. Nobody noticed the thieves while they knocked it down, or even that one horse was missing for almost a week. When the story broke, the developers offered $50,000 for its safe return, but speculation was that it was stolen for scrap. Just the day before I had worked on a story about how the rising prices paid for scrap metal have driven thefts of car batteries, cables, gutters, and even manhole covers. Another reason I was captivated all weekend. Then it turned out that's exactly what happened to the Indian - he was cut up and sold. The $500,000 statue paying out $3,900 as scrap.

The sculptures were created by Thomas Schomberg, which gives me an excuse to post the links to two more of my slide shows on another well-known public piece (Please click on the photos above). Schomberg is the very same artist who made the Rocky statute - originally a prop for the second movie sequel - now standing below the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Next up my on week of Public Art was a visit to the Northern Liberties studio of modern glass artist Ray King. Until I drove up Third Street, I had completely forgotten I'd met and photographed him almost ten years ago with he installed The Beacons, at Broad and Washington - as the entry to the Avenue of the Arts. King specializes in working with high tech film coatings on glass that bend, or split, light wavelengths into a wide spectrum of brilliant colors.He creates site-specific Public Art projects all over the world, but just put up a new piece here, called Hello David – an homage to 18th-century Philadelphia inventor David Rittenhouse who played with light-diffraction two hundred years ago. It went up on the day after the summer solstice, in honor of Rittenhouse's astronomical work. Inquirer critic Inga Saffron did the story on Sunday. I photographed him and his work twice on Friday. First in the afternoon, after checking with him to see what time the light works best on it, and then after shooting a housing story in Camden and Olympic soccer player Carli Lloyd in Delran, I drove back to Philadelphia

When I first called about taking photos, Ray was in Utah working on a new piece there. His wife Debbie had told me that the work, on the outside wall of his studio, overlooking a deck on their adjacent home, looked great illuminated at night. So since I am on the night shift, I knew I would be returning to take more shots of the wall. In the midday sun, it was almost too brilliant to look at. While shooting close-ups of the individual glass triangles, I noticed Ray’s reflection in a few – the ones off axis with the sun – and tried to capture what the selective focus of my eyes and brain were seeing. So by opening my lens up and focusing past the textured surface of the glass, I came close to making his reflection sharp without the triangles getting too distracting. At twilight, I knew I only had a few minutes to shoot him, and I thought, for just a second, that I would have Debbie hold a small strobe aimed at his face up on the roof top deck, which I could trigger from my camera on the street below. It would be a dramatic portrait. But as I looked up at the position of Ray standing on the roof, I almost immediately determined I would silhouette him against the work rather than have him distract from it. Do you think I did the right thing? How would you have photographed him and his artwork?

Then, still speaking of public art, even if it was only briefly public, there was Alex Irvine, last seen in this blog, and in the Scene Through the Lens newspaper column pushing his life size sculpture through Center City.

He recently emailed me to report it was just sold for a price greater than its weight in scrap metal (although it's made of stoneware ceramic). He says it was sold and installed in the person's house in less than a week of his taking it to the gallery. He also said he would be making another volcanic meditating figure for Chicago's SOFA - International Exposition of Sculpture Objects and Functional Art - Expo in Chicago in November. This is the time exposure photo Alex was making of the piece seated near City Hall when I first saw him.

Finally, in today's newspaper, a few older pieces, destined to become part of a new Public Art work someday. The demolition of the Race Street Firehouse - the last building remaining on the footprint - began yesterday.

For years as I walked from the Inquirer offices to Center City I’d admired the firefighting gargoyles above the big doors of the Italian Renaissance/Medieval Gothic castle designed by J. Molitor, the city's chief architect. It stood guard since 1925 and was a historic building until the Historical Commission decertified it last year.

The Pennsylvania Department of General Services, the state agency overseeing the expansion of the Pennsylvania Convention Center, removed the gargoyles and other decorative features of the building before the demolition. They’ve promised all the adornments - six gargoyles, six columns, two coats of arms/seals, the cornerstone, two doors with ornamental pilasters, and two fireplaces - will be displayed inside the new Convention Center when it is completed.

It was the DGS that knocked down the two historic facades on North Broad Street last year – at 6am on the Saturday before Christmas - in defiance of a protection ruling issued two days earlier by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

I was down the shore in Avalon last week photographing an updated cottage for the Home and Design section. The sky was so blue I couldn't stop looking up at it, After editing and sending my photos from the Avalon library I was heading north on the Garden State Parkway when I just had to exit at Ocean City, the light was getting so beautiful. I shot the boats just as an excuse to photograph that sky. And them wandered around the edges of the boardwalk where I made that day's Daily Photo.

Finally I had to head for home, and on the AC Expressway, came around a bend just as the sun was setting directly in front of me. After making sure there were no other cars near me, I grabbed my camera and clicked off a frame.

Then focusing again on my driving (which we should always be doing while behind the wheel), I squirted the windshield with washer fluid as the direct sun was glaring off the dead bugs. At that moment, I just had to reach for my camera on the front seat a second time - but as evidence I was concentrating more on my driving, I didn't even readjust the focus from infinity - and made another shot.

That is the overall theme of this blog, and why it is still called Scene on the Road, even though last summer's road trips are almost a faded memory. Photograph the journey - not just the destination. That means taking your camera out every day and making pictures, not just your usual moments - vacations, birthday parties, soccer games or ebay sale items - but give the rest of your day a shot as well.

As students we are told to keep a daily journal. I had an English Literature teacher who said, "if you don't write, how can you know what you're feeling?" She often added, for the benefit of those who struggled, "if you can't write it, how do you know it's real?" I work with a lot of reporters and they ALL write all the time - and not just for the newspaper - in blogs, magazine articles, and books. I've always admired photographers like Inquirer staffer Eric Mencher and soon-to-be co-worker Daily News Photographer David Maialetti who seem to have their cameras with them all the time. And use them.


I could never write (or compose music or poetry, or dance or sing either) so years ago I started taking pictures to express myself. At some point, I started taking fewer photos of everyday things concentrating on making images to get and then keep a job. So the time I've spent on my blog - shooting the Daily Photo has reconnected me with that every day kind of photography.

During last weekend's storm, I tried to photograph the lightning, but because of the clouds and all the trees in my neighborhood, I couldn't see a thing except brief flashes where the leaves would light up. Besides, it was scary. So I waited inside until the thunder stopped. It was still raining when I went back outside looking for pictures. I found one in the surface of my small patio pond. Then the power went out, and we were forced to eat all the ice cream in the freezer. Hours later, when everyone had gone to bed, I was still watching the flickering candle, wondering how I could capture the outage.

In something I haven't seen since the first Gulf War veterans arrived home, entire towns turned out to send two Olympic athletes off to Beijing.

I covered U.S. Olympic women's soccer midfielder Carli Lloyd (above) in her hometown of Delran for the newspaper, and went to the parade in Haddonfield for the U.S. Olympic track team's Erin Donohue (below) on my own.

I joined hundreds of other South Jersey residents along King's Highway in Donohue's hometown snapping away. It seemed to me there were more cameras recording the scene than I'd seen at other parades there. Not just photographing their own kids, everyone looked like they really were trying to capture a historic moment.

Donohue's star-spangled send-off came just a few weeks after she earned a spot on the team in the women's 1,500-meter final. She rode on top of a fire truck along the same street she ran daily as a young girl.

After the parade, supporters poured out of the stands at Haddonfield Memorial High School to run around the track with her.

In Delran, Lloyd's send-off was even more small-town. An ice cream parlor named a flavor after her - Carli's Cake Batter Cookie Dough Kick - and the mayor gave her a key to the township.

She signed autographs for all the hundred or so kids, and their parents and friends lined up holding jerseys, posters and soccer balls and she posed for photos with everyone.

The Delran HS boys soccer team ran over after practice to see the player who has been described as "capable of spraying the ball to teammates or putting it in the back of the net herself." She was the MVP of last year's prestigious Algarve Cup after scoring in all four games in Portugal.

The U.S. Women’s National Team plays its first game before the opening ceremonies, with a Group G opener against Norway today in Qinhuangdao.

We had near-perfect weather for at least half the weekend. Just like those beautiful days we can usually count on in September or October. Seemed every evening as I turned around, I found myself marveling at yet another spectacular sunset. I aimed my camera both east and west - and even toward the south at the sliver of a moon. This skyline was shot on Friday.

The photo – in black and white – is in today’s newspaper as the Scene Through the Lens column. The weekly column, which began in June, is moving from Wednesday to Monday. It will still appear each week inside the Local section, often (but not always) on page B-2. Space has tightened up, so it will also shrink from two photos to a single image. It will continue to run here on my blog each week.

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.

It's cliché that most clichés are true. But just because it’s true that kids play in open fire hydrants and the Swann Memorial Fountain in Logan Square during heat waves, I don’t think newspaper photographers should head there every time the temperature hits ninety degrees.

Animals are another definite photo cliché (Especially polar bears or penguins in a heat wave) so as I am always talking here all the time about trying to see fresh ways to shoot old photos and not rely on clichés, I try to avoid them (both animals and clichés) I don’t think I take that many pictures of animals, but a quick review of my Daily Photos shows that’s not necessarily true.

Former Inquirer editor Gene Roberts, who is always described as “legendary editor,” was the man responsible for bringing serious photojournalism to the now-discontinued Inquirer Sunday Magazine. I was the photo projects editor there for three years, when along with picture editor Bert Fox, we produced photo essays every week by the excellent photographers on our staff, as well as freelancers like David H. Wells, Stephen Shames, Christopher Morris, Burk Uzzle, Peter Turnley, Donna Ferrato, Anthony Suau and Pete Souza. Even after winning awards for telling visual stories of domestic violence, the fall of Communism, child poverty and homelessness, at least once a year Roberts would run into me in the hallway, and in a voice that is always described as either a “Southern, low and languid, slow, North Carolina or thick” drawl, would say to me: “You know, Tom, what people really like to see are animals. How about some more pictures of animals.”

People do like looking at animals. And photographers like taking pictures of both people and animals, so we so end up at zoos a lot, because that's where they both happen to come together, often in delightfully photographic ways.

Garry Winogrand photographed at the Bronx and Central Park zoos during the 1960’s. When “The Animals” series of photos debuted at The Museum of Modern Art, Director of Photography John Szarkowski said the pictures showed both humans and the caged animals “exhibiting bad manners and a mutual failure to recognize their own ludicrous predicaments.”

I haven’t been to a zoo in a long time. So after the reporter, zoo director and public relations person left me alone after an assignment at the Cape May County Zoo, I wandered around trying to channel the spirit of Winogrand and that other famous zoological park photographer Elliot Erwitt as I tried to find moms with feather plumed hats or dads in leopard spotted leisure suits.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Freelance photographer