A year of phone-o-graphs | Scene Through the Lens

Last week I wrote about my participation in our photography staff’s One Roll project.

After finishing my one week with one roll of black and white film and feeling rejuvenated by the experience, I wanted to continue to find ways to see things differently. To take pictures of new things (or to see old things in a new way).

I had already started walking around my town on most morning for exercise, and of course, like almost everyone else in the world now, I always have my smart phone with me.

I won’t call it complacency, but after a while it can become easy for a photographer (talking about a friend here) to think, “what am I gonna do with it, even if I were to take a picture of something I see.” In my case, I might wonder, if there’s no place for it in my newspaper - or family album - why bother?

That’s where the inspiration of the One Roll project comes in. I just started taking more pictures with my phone as I walked, using the physical exercise as an exercise in visualization as well. It was a fun and motivating way to find new things to photograph each day as the light, the seasons, and my attitudes changed how I saw everything along my walks. A year ago I formalized the effort, gave it a name, and started posting the images on Instagram, to share with friends and followers. But mostly It was just to have a way to collect the pictures all in one place.

While many of my phone-o-graphs look like the images I publish every week in my newspaper column, this is actually the first one I have used here in the past year of my “Morning Walk” pictures.

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:

» SEE MORE: Archived columns and Twenty years of a photo column