Mikie Sherrill and the sharks
Scene Through the Lens with photographer Tom Gralish.
This week offered two excellent examples of the variety of assignments I get. And both required my getting up well before dawn.
I was in a bagel baker’s kitchen at 4:30 a.m. one morning and a few days later, meeting bridge painters at 6 a.m. in a fenced-in parking lot 200 feel under their workspace. Neither story has published yet, but here’s a photo preview.
(Fun fact: The Commodore Barry Bridge, connecting Chester, Pa. to Bridgeport, N.J., is Pennsylvania’s longest, and the 4th largest cantilever bridge in the world.)
Also in the mix this week was a typical business assignment: covering a gathering of lots of people in suits.
The annual meeting of the Camden Community Partnership — a coalition of government, business, healthcare, education, nonprofit, and community leaders — was honoring one of their own with the “Camden Hero Award,” so I wasn’t surprised to see his face along with other honorees on one of the posters in the lobby.
I didn’t expect to see New Jersey Governor’s face among them, as her delivering the keynote address wasn’t mentioned on my photo assignment. Our governors are here a lot (I had just photographed Mikie Sherrill myself twice in the previous week). But I figured I would make a photo or two of her for the files, as long as I was there.
Then I stepped into the main meeting room. Of course I knew it was at the Adventure Aquarium but I had no idea it was right next to the 550,000-gallon Shark Realm’s exhibit.
Suddenly, I was thrilled. This was not a typical business assignment. There were so many visual opportunities!
Waiting for my subject to receive his award, I scouted all the angles. I knew I needed a straight-forward image that showed readers who he was, but as we weren’t doing a story on the governor’s speech, the liberating and exciting thing for me was getting to make a cool shark photo of her — without having to similarly show her face.
Once I found where I wanted to stand, right next to the tank’s big window, in the back of the room looking at all the reflections, it was just a matter — as always — of waiting for all the elements to come together. There are over 200 animals in the tank, but I just needed one of the several shark species — sand bar, nurse, or tiger — to swim past.
I could tell the Governor was nearing the end of her speech and I only had small fish or a shark passing by up high in my frame. Then I saw a big one — no idea what kind — getting close, when it suddenly decided to do a little spinning flip right in front of me. I hit the shutter on burst mode.
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:
» SEE MORE: Archived columns and Twenty years of a photo column.
