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Wings Over the River

The battleship New Jersey, alone but for the photographer and some seagulls.

I've been known to look kindly on pigeons in my street photography. Sometimes when taking pictures, of say the exterior of a bank building for a business story, I'll wait for one - or a bicycle messenger - to enter the scene before snapping the shutter.

So when I was shooting the USS New Jersey for a story (by Inquirer writer Edward Colimore) on the historic battleship's latest fight - to pay its bills and fend off attempts to move it from Camden to North Jersey.

I and my photo colleagues at the newspaper have photographed "Big J" hundreds of times since BB-62 was moved back to the Delaware River in 1999 (for restoration work in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, where she was born just before WWII).  I just needed an "updated" photo of the ship, which is only open for tours on weekends during the winter. So I couldn't go onboard, and there was nobody around on the cold waterfront that morning but me.

...and the seagulls (kinda like pigeons).