Tag: Scene Through the Lens

The reconstructed “ghost” structure with partial walls and windows of the building known in the eighteenth-century as 190 High Street is officially titled, “Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation” (2010).

The open-air President’s House installation in Independence National Historical Park was designed to give visitors a sense of the house where the first two presidents of the United States, George Washington and John Adams, served their terms of office.

The commemorative site designed by Emanuel Kelly, with Kelly/Maiello Architects, pays homage to nine enslaved people of African descent who were part of the Washington household with videos scripted by Lorene Cary and directed by Louis Massiah.

Just like the Rocky statue I photographed last week in anticipation of this week’s news, the President’s House was in the news last year so it remains on my radar as I walk around Old City (our newsroom is right across the street).

The cloud formation in the winter sky was what first caught my attention. Then it was seeing the sun lined up directly behind the triangular pediment above the Georgian home’s “front door.”

I played with “placement” of the sun peeking through a tiny gap at a bottom corner of the gable. I knew knew that f/22 on my mirrorless camera’s lens would give me a nice starburst. It’s an optical effect that happens because the lens’ aperture blades don’t form a perfect circle. And the narrower the opening — like f/22 — the more pronounced the effect (shooting at f/2.8 is not quite as dramatic).

Then it was simply a matter of my moving my head ever-so-slightly to align the sun with the little hole — like threading a needle.

While standing in the thin shadow of the door, I was getting blasted in the eye each time I moved. Then a group of tourists, or a noise, startled a flock of pigeons and as they took flight I was not poised just right, but I liked having the birds there better than a perfect placement of the starburst.

I tried a similar “trick” a few years ago, when walking around my town photographing with my iPhone. It doesn’t have a mechanical diaphragm so the effect is not the same. Plus, the threading-the-needle part is much more difficult when you are not actually looking through the lens as in a DSLR. And with a backlight sun blasting you directly in the face.

The optical principle of refraction through a lens diaphragm is the same for both mirrorless and DSLR cameras because light travels through the lens elements and aperture in the same way.

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.

I stepped into a real live, working — smells and all — black and white darkroom this week, for the first time in decades.

I watched Charlotte Astor, a junior at Cherry Hill High School East, develop her B&W photographs in the school’s darkroom.

For a few years after The Inquirer went digital I kept the small enlarger and other personal equipment that I’d used in my crude basement darkroom from when I was starting out. I had little use for it after I got my first staff job with bigger and better facilities. It all stayed boxed up, through multiple moves, long after I’d stopped exposing any film — even for family photos.

I finally gave it all away when young people first started using analog formats like typewriters, vinyl records, “dumb phones,” and film cameras as a move away from digital overload. (A few years ago our photo staff did a group project where we each took a turn with the same 35 mm mechanical camera using just one roll of black-and-white film.)

Like many digital natives who grew up with smartphones and the internet and are now “detoxing,” Astor has totally embraced B&W 35 mm, photographing at hardcore shows around the area for a zine she self-publishes, “Through Our Eyes.”

“So often,” she says of the music scene, “you’ll see these people taking a million photos a second, and to me it’s just waste. When I shoot film, I only have 36 shots before I gotta risk reloading in the middle of the pit, so every shot I have to make count. It keeps me in that moment, with this kind of clarity. When you get the shot, even though you can’t see it, you just know that you got that moment perfect. That moment means everything to me. I wouldn’t trade it for the world, and digital will never come close.”

But that’s not why I was taking her picture. Our story, published next week, is about Astor’s four year search for a demo tape — yes, an analog cassette — from her mother’s teenage band.

I enjoyed talking with her about photography, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what digital photography has brought us.

Film demanded patience and technical precision. Digital offered instant feedback and greater flexibility in lighting conditions.

Photojournalists delivered images faster, adapted to the demands of online media and met tighter and more frequent deadlines.

The transition hasn’t changed the way I see, and interpret. I still emphasize composition, context, or complexity. However, I have adapted and adjusted. I see the value in making the kinds of thumbnails that online platforms prioritize to generate algorithmic attention.

Between photographing for stories on assignment I still wander whatever neighborhood I am in looking for “standalones.”

But I am also always on the lookout for “stock” photos that can be used as thumbnails with future stories. Think images of police tape or flashing lights, city street scenes, and skylines, educational, civic, and medical institutions.

After an assignment at the Philadelphia Art Museum, I loitered outside.

Ahead of Sunday’s wildcard playoff game against the San Francisco 49ers, the museum put up giant cutouts of four Eagles players on its iconic front steps. The cutouts first appeared in 2014 (before the Birds’ wild-card loss to the New Orleans Saints) and again a few times over the years, including before both Super Bowl wins in 2018 and last year.

The newspaper already has lots of photos from the steps, including many of that movie prop, but I knew the city’s Art Commission is voting next week to see if it stays, or not.

So what’s one — or two — more? (There are currently two versions at the museum!)

If it stays, the “original” version of the statue from 1982’s Rocky III that now sits at street level would be moved inside the museum for an exhibit this summer, then go back outside and installed at the top of the steps “permanently.” And the “second casting” statue there now “temporarily” would be returned to Sylvester Stallone.

(If it sounds like I have more than a passing interest in this, I do. Reporter Mike Vitez and I spent an entire year on the steps to produce the locally best-selling book Rocky Stories: Tales of Love, Hope, and Happiness at America’s Most Famous Steps.)

It was that really nice, warm sprint-like day we had on Wednesday, following those bitterly cold first days of 2026, so I didn’t mind being outside making “stock” photos.

And THAT’S when I spotted a real moment — the kind photographers live for — of the family taking selfies on the steps, and how I ended up making the photo at the very top of this column.

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.

Just a week ago, in my last column of 2025 I said I was looking forward. So where do I go in the very first column of 2026?

When you drive for decades all over the city on assignment certain streets, buildings or neighborhoods tilt you toward the past.

Memories don’t just live in one place but are scattered across the map, waiting around a corner, or sitting on a stoop like an old friend. Every recurring event or anniversary replays images in my head.

I went to the Convention Center two days before the Mummers Parade, looking as I have many times, to make a photo ahead of the event.

But this year, there were no Fancy Brigade members in the cavernous room. Nobody working on their elaborate stage sets or rehearsing their Broadway-quality choreographed performances.

As a cost-cutting measure this year, the clubs only booked the hall (and union workers) for an eight-hour shift in the evening. No early overtime.

So there I was, “seeing” feathered and sequined Mummer ghosts of my memory dancing through the hall. Then, like in the 2006 movie Night at the Museum. I almost wondered if a Greek god, 15 foot high Tiki figure or jester would suddenly come alive.

On New Year’s Eve, I photographed a 93 year-old Welsh grandmother visiting the Mummers Museum.

The next day she was to live her dream of going to the parade. I wondered what she was thinking the next day, even as I photographed it for my umpteenth time, collecting more memories and learning, as always, how to see things in new ways.

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.

I set out deliberately this week to make an astronomical event photo for this space. I’ve done Santa and a menorah already this winter so I wanted to give props to the solstice.

With the days getting shorter leading up Dec. 21, I first thought of sunset occurring earlier. But I worked nights for many years and photographed many of those.

Then I thought of all the time I’ve spent in our city’s historic district. (I love history, as the following paragraphs will attest, and I expect I’ll be there even more in 2026 as we celebrate the Semiquincentennial.)

I recalled a Chippendale armchair in the Assembly Room of Independence Hall made by Philadelphia cabinetmaker John Folwell in the years after our country was born. George Washington sat in the mahogany chair with a gilded sun carved into it for three months in 1787 as he presided over the Constitutional Convention.

Benjamin Franklin is credited with immortalizing the chair at the close of the convention, expressing his optimism for the future of the new nation while looking at the design.

”Often and often … I have looked at that {sun} … without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting, but now at length, I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”

That’s why I decided to get out early this week to find a photo at sunrise, as I look ahead to the future.

However, speaking of history, there is also an established tradition of news organizations looking back at the end of the year.

So here is the Inquirer photo staff’s “Year in Review.” A visual record of the challenges, achievements, and the everyday moments of a year lived in full.

2025, as seen through our lenses.

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.

Can you see all four? There is one “real” image of SEPTA trolley operator Victoria Daniels and three different reflections.

I only saw two reflections as I was trying to focus and compose while bracing my camera on the back of a seat to stabilize myself on the moving trolley. I wanted to photograph the light at the end of the tunnel (the metaphor was apt, as tens of thousands of riders are hoping for some relief as service in the Center City Tunnel has been shut down for weeks.)

Sound like I was having fun? (I was.)

SEPTA held a press conference to update commuters on repairs after glitches stranded passengers in the tunnel and the Federal Transit Administration ordered the agency to inspect the catenary system (the connection between the overhead wires and the pole that conducts electricity to the vehicle) along all its trolley routes.

More than just a “talker” the SEPTA folks first showed lots of equipment parts and then we got to take a field trip, riding a trolley into the closed tunnel to see where they were repairing the overhead wire.

While, for most of the media, the ride was just a way to get to the closed station for the show-and-tell, for me it was an opportunity to take pictures out the windows — something I like to do anytime I am on public transit. And play around with exposures …

…which sometimes just doesn’t work out.

Two things that did work out photographically this week; the first snowfall of the season:

And, on the same day, a firefighter Santa riding through the neighborhood.

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.

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.