Residents watch police and firefighter activity at the scene of a fatal crash in their Pennsauken neighborhood. Police said a man was killed when he lost control of his SUV and it slammed into a tree.

I was photographing New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine at an early morning election day get-out-the-vote rally in South Jersey (after covering the SEPTA strike in pre-dawn).  I knew we'd get election night wire photos later, so I figured I was shooting head shots for our website and maybe an early newspaper edition.

The morning light was really pretty (for some reason not many political rallies start real early). And there was a really big backlit flag. So I shot a lot (did I mention a big flag?). 

I edited from all the various expressions, and sent one into the paper.

Guess I picked the wrong frame.

Tonight, the results are in and Christopher J. Christie has overcome a powerful Democratic (and $30 million) advantage to defeat Corzine and become New Jersey's first Republican governor-elect in a dozen years.

He was checking his watch in this photo.

Leaves and raindrops during the Head of the Schuylkill Regatta.

Street artist Shepard Fairey has confessed he lied about which photo he used as the basis for his Barack Obama "HOPE" poster.  Also that he fabricated and tried to destroy evidence to bolster his fair use case against photographer Mannie Garcia and the AP.

When web-sleuths found the source photo earlier this year, and the photographer was indentified as Mannie Garcia, a Washington D.C. based freelancer, Fairey did admit he used Mannie's image. However, Fairey claimed it wasn't actually the tight portrait shot by Garcia he traced for the poster, but a different frame made by the same photographer at the same event - a Darfur press conference with then-Senator Obama, Republican Senator Sam Brownback and actor George Clooney at the National Press Club in Washington in 2006. Garcia had covered it on assignment for the Associated Press.

After the wire service and Mannie started talking copyright infringement, Fairey made what the NY Times called a "pre-emptive strike" and filed a lawsuit last February in U.S. District Court seeking a declaratory judgment that he is protected under Fair Use Doctrine copyright exceptions. He was saying it's okay to use Mannie's photo of Obama without credit, permission, or payment.

Though apparently not confident enough in making his fair-use case, Fairey tried to bolster his claim by saying he "used only a portion of the looser Garcia photograph." That way he could say the poster - with Clooney cropped out - was a "highly transformative" alteration, "...with new meaning, new expression, and new messages."

Most photographers saw through this right away. Just as the movies or television always get it wrong when portraying photojournalists (ever see anyone using potato masher handle-mount strobes on the sidelines at a football game?) non-photographers think a picture is just a picture.

In fact, photographers gave Fairey more credit for transforming the photo than he actually deserved. When Michael Cramer here in Philadelphia initially found the Jim Young Reuters photo we erronously all thought was the source photo, the Photoshop flipping and adding of a tie and collar was a part of what made it so appealing. It just seemed like something an artist wanting to put his own spin on an existing image might do.

But as far as the Garcia photo goes, we WERE all right. The Photoshop composite evidence created by the many web-sleuths - including Steve Simula, Nathan Lunstrum and Chris Perley - was right on.  Fairey used the tight Garcia Obama portrait. Now Fairey's  amended filing will stand or fall on the Fair Use Doctrine alone. A portion of the new filing, with changes red-lined by Fairey's attorneys, is below.

Click here to download a pdf of Fairey's entire "Amended complaint for declaratory judgement and injunctive relief" filed against the Associated Press on Oct. 16, 2009.

Click here for Fairey's statement. The AP's press release is here.

And an archive of all my previous Obama Source Photo blog posts is here.

Philadelphia Fashion Week started yesterday and continues tonight and Saturday at the 23rd Street Armory with all the familiar industry stuff: red carpets, models, music performers, VIP lounges, after-parties and clothes. These models were waiting to be called during last week's fitting at Matthew Izzo.

In 1969 George Smith - along with Willard Boyle - invented the "charge-coupled device" to convert an optical image to an electric signal (six years later, Steven Sasson, an engineer at Kodak would use their CCD to build the world’s first digital camera)

Almost exactly forty years later to the day, a handful of newspaper and television photographers would be pointing our digital cameras at one of the winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics. That's Smith, with his sailboat at his home on Barnegat Bay hours after the announcement, talking with Newark Star Ledger staff photographer Noah K. Murray,  right, and freelancer Christopher Barth.

Working at the famed Bell Laboratories in New Jersey in 1969, Smith and Boyle were brainstorming to come up with a new kind of semiconductor memory. Their charge-coupled device consisted of a few small capacitors that can store electric charge when struck by light. Today these pockets of charge are better known by another name: pixels.

I've talked before about the White House posting President Barack Obama's photos on flicker, but over the weekend, I came across a fascinating set on the State Department's page.

Last Wednesday, the President and First Lady hosted a reception at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, during which they posed for individual photographs with all the visiting foreign dignitaries in town for the UN meeting.

You can click on each picture for the names and countries of each world leader. I wondered if Official White House photographer Lawrence Jackson had to ask each one, "Do you have a card, your Royal Highness? I just want to make sure I spell your name right." Or whose job was tougher; his or the president's? "Sorry, your Excellency, I think you blinked in that one." Viewers have even tagged some of the photos with notes about wives' shoes.

I didn't really flip through ALL 134 photos, but what brought me to the site in the first place was this twenty second time lapse video made by Eric Spiegelman. He noted the President "has exactly the same smile in every single shot," and aligned all the photos to dramatically show Obama's"amazingly consistent smile."

I'm sure you could do the same thing with any celebrity who has to do "Meet and Greets." I saw something similar on the web a few years ago with Paris Hilton at a perfume (or book?) signing. I guess the rich and famous need to produce a photo-ready smile when called upon.

Spiegelman himself said on his blog, "my sense is that every president of the 20th century was capable of this. But Obama is the only one who put all his photos on the Internet, so he's the only one we can prove has this skill."

The images aren't in the order shot, and I didn't open all  of them, but making a random check of the EXIF data on a few of the photos I found one made as early as 7:05pm and one taken as late as 8:16pm. So Jackson was shooting at a pretty healthy clip himself. (Also on the EXIF: he used a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, shooting at 1/200 th second at f/5.6 with a mid-range zoom).

As if that's all not enough, the other fascinating thing I found? There were originally the 135 group photos, but one was removed by the White House after causing a bit of a stir in Spain. Unlike Obama, the Spanish president/prime minister is fiercely private about his children's lives. So the public had never before seen pictures of his 13 and 16 year old daughters. Many were surprised by their goth appearance. Madrid's oldest newspaper, Dario ABC ran the photo (credited to "CASA BLANCA") with the girls' faces pixelated. White House officials withdrew the family photograph after the Spanish Government asked them "to protect the privacy of the two daughters of the Spanish president, for being underage.”

400 years ago Galileo handmade this telescope using two half-shells of carved wood bound together with copper wire, which he then wrapped in paper and varnished.

It was being crated up after a summer exhibition, "Galileo, the Medici and the Age of Astronomy," closed this week at the Franklin Institute. Squinting through the eyepiece, Galileo would have been able to observe the moon's craters and the planets Venus and Jupiter says Franklin chief astronomer Derrick Pitts, adding "it was the only telescope found among Galileo's personal belongings when he died."

Curators from the Istituto e Museo della Storia di Scienza packed it for the trip back to Italy. Click here for photos of the move, and here for Inquirer reporter Sam Wood's story.

Seated next to Humane Society head Wayne Pacelle (far right), Eagles quarterback Michael Vick (second from right) watches one of the Society's dog videos before speaking to freshman at the Nueva Esperanza Academy.

Accompanied by team security personel, it was his first appearance in Philadelphia as a spokesman for animal rights. Making a Freudian slip, Vick told the kids he was "an animal cruelty advocate." (hear it at the 3 minute mark on Sarah J. Glover's video here).



He made references to having a "dark side,"  but the Inquirer's Ashley Fox says in her column he sounded "too rehearsed. There wasn't enough contrition. He seemed sorry only that he got caught, not sorry for what he did."

Fellow Inquirer columnist Phil Sheridan writes, "Vick didn't really tell his 'story.' He acknowledged listening to his friends and getting into trouble, but he didn't explain what he did, or why. He didn't tell them he was the owner and operator of a large criminal enterprise."