Author: Tom Gralish

I was so close. If I had made it through one or two more green lights while driving from my last assignment… Or if I had not waited so long for the “right” car to pass in front of the building I was photographing for a real estate story…

Then I might’ve been there seconds earlier when Gen. Washington stood at the back of his SUV placing his sword on the hip of his dress uniform. Or photographed him walking through the empty parking garage.

Instead, I arrived at the elevators seconds after he did.

There isn’t a day that goes by that I am not reminded how photography is all about the timing. And I don’t mean just the 1/500th of a second your camera shutter is open.

There is an expression “f/8 and be there” often attributed to legendary photographer Arthur “Weegee” Fellig. The “there” has come to mean not fussing over the technical aspects — an f-stop/lens aperture — of taking pictures but instead being “in the moment.”

Weegee, however, meant it literally. He was a New York crime scene photographer in the 1930s and 1940s famous for arriving before the police and made his living getting there and taking a picture before his competition (there were a dozen newspapers and tabloids in Manhattan back then).

Another “good timing” came for me last Saturday. I was in Center City with my family on my day off. There were so many people in the Christmas Village in LOVE Park we walked along the outskirts, where we found the annual Festibus competition. That’s where SEPTA employees volunteer their time to decorate buses for the holidays and compete for bragging rights. And let riders vote for their favorites among the eight decorated buses parked along JFK Boulevard and 15th Street.

I made a fast photo of SEPTA workers costumed as Care Bears who went over to a passing coworker stopped in traffic. But I couldn’t leave with only a photo of the backsides of mechanic Raymond Borges and operators Jose DeCos and James Smith.

So I stayed behind to document more of their greeting visitors and some of the other buses.

One more “right place” earlier in the week, covering another Semiquincentennial event, local artists painting 20 Liberty Bell replicas for placing in Philadelphia neighborhoods in 2026.

Walking out of the garage where the artists were working, I heard a news helicopter and looked up, then over to see a column of smoke rising to the north.

I got there as firefighters were just starting to climb up to the rowhouse roofs on North Lambert Street.

The fire, near La Salle University, was placed under control within an hour. But sadly, a 70-year-old mother of three did not get out in time and died in the blaze.

Since 1998 a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in the print editions of The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color:

» SEE MORE: Archived columns and Twenty years of a photo column.

This week after completing two different portrait assignments I was was looking around as I walked back to my parked car.

I’d seen it in Old City before, but on a really clear, cold morning when the sky’s color perfectly matched that of the Ben Franklin Bridge towering over the public artwork on Columbus Boulevard, I looked more carefully at the giant knot of stainless steel spheres.

Sometimes you go looking for pictures but “found” pictures are most often located just where you happen to be.

I studied the shiny surface, looking through my viewfinder, varying the focal length on the two zoom lenses I had (a 24-70mm and 70-200mm) and switching between different apertures to achieve either more or less depth-of-focus on the orbs and the reflections they mirrored.

I also made a slightly “harsher” version of the blue sky and bridge.

Weather the day before was in sharp contrast — literally, with winds blowing rain almost knife-like horizontally at me as I fought with my umbrella to make a picture outside following another indoor portrait assignment.

I ended up moving to the roof of the garage where I parked my car.

A note in support of copy editors: You know how seeing writers (mostly on social media) confusing a possessive pronoun with a contraction or thinking an apostrophe always indicates possession can be mildly distfacting or jarringly annoying to readers? (it’s vs. its and your vs. you’re.)

Well as a long-time photo caption reader (and writer) there are two common errors that exasperate me. Those would be the names of a common migratory water fowl and one of Philadelphia’s three major waterways.

Addam Schwartz, The Inquirer’s senior multiplatform editor, wrote the rain caption for the print version of the photo. He correctly changed my “Schuylkill River” to just plain “Schuylkill.” He knows the word means “hidden river,” so “River” is redundant. (It was named by Dutch settlers in the early 1600s. Prior to that time, the river was called Manayunk, meaning “where we go to drink” or Ganoshowanna, meaning “falling water” by the Lenape.)

In my defense I also know all that. Decades ago Suzanne Weston, the copy editor at Inquirer Magazine when I was on staff there educated me. But I do make mistakes, especially when typing captions on my laptop in my car.

And, it’s Canada goose, not Canadian. As a Consulate General in Minneapolis pointed out to me decades ago, while Canada would be proud to claim Branta canadensis as its own, they belong to ALL of the continent.

(By the way, Schuylkill Expressway IS okay.)

Since 1998 a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in the print editions of The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color:

» SEE MORE: Archived columns and Twenty years of a photo column.