Politics as Usual | Scene Through the Lens

My week started with a Faith and Safety mayoral candidates forum hosted by POWER Interfaith, a grassroots organization of over 50 Pennsylvania congregations committed to racial and economic justice …

… and the politics continued in Washington, D.C, where Sen. John Fetterman returned to the Capitol after six weeks of hospitalization for treatment for clinical depression.

Then my editor asked if I wanted “a break” from politics and offered to have someone else cover a forum with the Democratic candidates for mayor, hosted by the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, focusing on issues impacting the local Black community.

You can see from this week’s Scene photo at the top what my answer was.

I’ve talked about that here before, but even with the Sixers advancing into the next round of the NBA Playoffs, I’d much rather cover politics, and with Philadelphia’s primary election on May 16 I will have even more opportunities in the coming weeks.

Another thing I’ve talked about here before are photo clichés. But I didn’t intentionally use two similar gimmicks in the same week.

The “starburst” from the TV light at the mayoral forum? A fortunate accident. The similar “sunstar” in my photo of a small urban tract of woods that were protected from development on Earth Day twenty years ago? That was on purpose.

That burst happens when light from a single source — like the sun, or a streetlight at night — is diffracted as it passes through the aperture blades of the diaphragm inside the lens. An even-number of blades bends the light into that many radiating streaks. But a diaphragm with an odd-number of aperture blades — like the nine inside my Nikon Z 24-70mm F2.8 — forms double the streaks. And those 18 “star points” became more pronounced when I used a smaller aperture — f/22 in this case.

>>SEE MORE: An Earth Day photo appreciation of an old-growth forest in South Jersey

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