Signs of fall are popping up around Philly

As long as weather counts as news, and newspaper photographers have to cover it, I’m grateful to live in a place with four distinct seasons. It is a joy to be in a temperate climate zone and have something new to look forward to. At least four times a year.

Trees in the city are just now starting to show their fall colors, and I thought about the changes that are coming while walking along Museum Row, on the Ben Franklin Parkway one night this week.

Maybe it was just the artificial lighting, slightly warmer than the spotlights on the building, but the trees reflected in the Tabletop Fountain outside the Barnes Foundation were especially glowing.

Fall foliage was on my mind as I drove between assignments, seeing a single red, yellow, or orange tree here or there, among others that were still green. Most were not in the best light for photos, or in a place I could safely pull over to make pictures.

I did finally find an early autumn adopter that worked. But then it was more of the waiting I often talk about, for that one little “extra” element.

And wait I did. In 1996, less than half the cars sold in the U.S. were white, black, gray, or silver. Today, grayscale colors account for 80.4% of the U.S. car market. And as if I needed a study to tell me, there aren’t as many red ones on the road anymore. In 1996 it was one of America’s dominant car colors, accounting for 20.1% of the market. By 2025, red’s share had fallen to just seven percent. (Yellow is an even rarer sight.)

Back to my walking at night, I paused outside the now-closed-to-the-public (even during the daytime) Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University.

Through the window I could make out glimpses of bones, before I spotted the painting of my favorite Late Cretaceous Period creature: South Jersey’s own, and the state dinosaur of New Jersey, Hadrosaurus foulkii. It was unearthed in a marl pit in Haddonfield in1858, the first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton to be discovered virtually intact anywhere in the world.

This would’ve also been the end of this week’s column.

However…

On Thursday, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill visited high school students to talk about the state’s new bell-to-bell restrictions on cellphones, in a roundtable discussion — without the news media invited inside. She and education officials and a student would talk afterward at a press conference.

Waiting outside the room for them to leave the closed meeting room, I saw longtime Cherry Hill Courier-Post reporter Jim Walsh go over to watch through a glass door. Good thinking, I said to myself, as I walked across the library to photograph the governor and students through a different window.

It’s one thing to act on someone else’s idea, but I was certainly not going to take my pictures looking over Jim’s shoulder. However I did include him in one of my photos to show that we were outside, looking in.

I have prided myself over the years on having a good eye, a way at looking at things differently. I arrive at events early and stay after they’re over. When other photographers have decided there’s nothing new happening, I look for unexpected angles and wait for unguarded moments.

But this assignment didn’t produce any surprises. My “best” photo was pretty routine. A “podium shot” but at least I included the school’s Crimson Cougar mascot. Good enough, I figured; I’ve got the signs, the main players, the student representative, and even the locked safe the kids’ cellphones are stored in while they’re in school.

At home later that evening I was scrolling through my social media, checking the groups I belong to (I like to tell myself it’s just to look for story ideas).

Then I came across a totally original and amazing photograph from the very same event I’d covered earlier.

When I first started taking pictures for my high school newspaper I didn’t know what I was doing. And I had no idea I would ever end up doing it for a living.

As I grew in my newspaper career I made lots of mistakes that better photographers would never have made. But eventually I started making pictures that better photographers wished they’d thought of.

Even though I have never had any illusions about being the most talented photographer in the room, I have come to feel secure that my years of experience have honed some pretty good instincts.

That’s why it’s humbling now, even though I knew it would eventually happen.

One day a photographer would come along with a fresh perspective. Someone who makes me feel like a beginner again. Someone who saw something I had not noticed or even considered. Something simple yet astonishing.

But ironically it isn’t the young photographer coming up behind me. On this day anyway, it was someone who has already been here.

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