Framed | Scene Through the Lens

You can hold the camera button down on your smart phone and capture a dozen photos in one second, so it’s easy to forget there was a time when, if you pushed the shutter button on a camera, it took a single picture. Just one.

I wrote last fall about The Inquirer photo staff’s One Roll Project to step back and slow down. To think about a just one photo at a time, rather than firing off a motorized sequence of images.

In my newspaper work I try to visually arrange and ascetically align all the compositional elements in a scene, before deciding to push the shutter. I observe and patiently wait for just the right action to take place or that expression by my subject that makes the revealing and story-telling picture. It’s what Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the most influential photographers in the 20th Century, called the “Decisive Moment.”

But sometimes that just comes about through pure chance;

To make this week’s picture I did put myself and my camera in the right place at the right time, so it wasn’t just happenstance. But I was on a train moving about 40 mph, on a bridge fast approaching a sign on the side of a building that was almost on top of the tracks.

I just fired a motor drive burst from my camera and through sheer luck, and the “VOTE” appeared, framed perfectly in the window.

Philadelphia’s municipal primary election is this coming Tuesday. At the time of the candidates’ ballot filing deadline three months ago, there were twelve Democrats running for mayor and one Republican (There were also almost 50 candidates vying for the 17 seats on City Council, plus dozens of candidates for other judicial and city offices). I have been photographing many of them at forums and other voter events around the city, but with such a large field of candidates, the newspaper is always looking for “neutral” images that can illustrate election stories - without seeming to favor individual candidates:

When I first saw the sign (for a candidate for Philadelphia Sheriff) while driving across the Ben Franklin Bridge I realized I could make another, similiar “generic” election photo, if I could highlight only the “Vote” portion of the sign. Since I couldn’t stop my car in the middle of bridge traffic, the way to make the picture would be buy a train ticket, and do it as I rode past.

Here are some more - non-candidate - photos from the campaign.

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 Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color: