Are you still a photographer? | Scene Through the Lens

“Are you still taking pictures?”

That was the question I got from almost everyone at a recent family reunion.

Then came the follow-up question: “Are you still working at a newspaper?”

My colleague Melanie Burney wrote a “Where are they Now” story this weekend about five high-achieving student leaders who were profiled in the Inquirer Neighbors section 35 years ago when they graduated from Haverford High School.

It was interesting to read how some of their lives took different directions than their original career goals.

That makes for a more dramatic story, but for me, things went pretty much the way I’d hoped.

» SEE MORE: Twenty years of a photo column

I started making pictures in junior high school — mainly to show my friends and family what I saw everyday — and I’m still doing just that.

And, as a result, every day for me is sort of like a busman’s holiday. I am still taking pictures. All the time. Whether I am being paid for it or not.

Flying to Minnesota for the family reunion, my mother and siblings and I were all arriving on the same day. So we’d agreed to get one rental car and all wait for each other in the terminal at Minneapolis-St.Paul International Airport. I came in first, around 8:30 a.m., and the others were scheduled to arrive throughout the morning and early afternoon.

So I had time to kill. I could have read a book, shopped in the many stores located in almost every airport these days, or even hit a concourse bar. (Why is it socially acceptable to drink before lunch if you’re at an airport?)

Instead I did what I always do, I took pictures.

Yes, those are not traditional “newspaper”photos. But they are the kinds of pictures I made everyday with my first camera, and shared with those relatives back in those ‘look at what I saw” days. And they are like many of the pictures I take for work. And get to share with readers.

Like the picture of Donna Smith above. I was headed somewhere else, just like at the airport in Minneapolis, when saw her at the bus stop. I asked I could take her picture, after complementing her on her outfit. She said “it’s called color coordinating,” just as the two red cars drove by. And that’s why I still take 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