Some days go exactly the way you would expect. Then some don't. Thankfully, most of my days - like today - are more like the latter than the former, which is one of the great things about newspaper photojournalism.
When my day started, I had no idea I would spend half of it standing outside a chain link fence with an old manual focus Nikon 800mm f/5.6 telephoto lens on a tripod aimed toward a UPS cargo plane. I'll get back to that in a bit. Luckily, as the day became colder and more windy, I had a warm jacket with me, because when my day started - long before sunrise - I did know I would be out on the Schuylkill River at 6:15 a.m.
The first thing Mitch Budman said to me when I arrived this morning was, "you should have been here yesterday." I saw the wisps of mist and fog hugging the ground Thursday morning, so I knew just what he meant. He is a crew coach and also with University Barge Club (the second oldest of the historic rowing clubs on Philadelphia's Boat House Row, and sponsor of the regatta) so he is out on the river every day. I sometimes envy people (not just photographers) who happen to be in a place that changes over time - and I can appreciate what they witness. But then, even subtle change in a place as simple as a backyard can be dramatic (see Eirik Solheim's One Year in 40 Seconds from a few years ago) so no excuses. It's not the place, but the person.
In this place though, on this day, the sun came up like it always does, but the sky kind of just went from black to grey.
While on the river after sunrise though, the clouds opened up for about two minutess, and the sun blasted through hitting only the tree tops. For a minute there I thought I was on a kayak somewhere in a mountain canyon.
It didn't last, which would have been disappointing, since I had a train to catch, the 8:26 to Cynwyd. SEPTA was rolling out the first of its long-awaited Silverliner V passenger railcars for an inaugural revenue trip. Transit agency officials, invited guests, and a handful of paying customers, made the trip from Center City to the end of the short line and then back into Suburban Station for platform ceremonies.
I was sending photos from the morning when I was dispatched to join Daily News photographer Alejandro A. Alvarez at Philadelphia International Airport, where the discovery of packages containing hidden explosives sent from Yemen and bound for the United States touched off a wide-scale terrorism alert. Two UPS cargo planes here were detained. Alex had already been all around the airport looking for vantage points and already sent some photos. So he continued to watch one of the plane, while I staked out the other.
With no activity around the plane, I entertained myself by working on my timing. Trying to capture landing airliners in just the "right" position behind the tail of the UPS plane. It was not a motor drive thing, just a single frame.
Eventually, there was some movement around the plane, and after Alex left, I drove around to the other side of the airport, where I could better see the plane as police boarded it. They found nothing.