Consider this post the official unveiling of my Philadelphia Photo blog:

The Daily Philly: a picture of philly. daily. (almost)
(also on Facebook, Twitter, & Google+)

The Story

I love photography. My dad was a professional photographer for most of my life, photographing my soccer teams and conducting annual Christmas portraits with my brother and me. He’s taught photography at Community Colleges and passed down much of what he knew to me. (I’ve even started doing a personal weekend photo photo challenge on this blog)

I also love Philadelphia. It’s culture, history, feel, and rhythm speak to me in such a real and deep way. It’s big enough that it’s a “real” city: it has art, culture, museums, great food, history, business, urban politics, and even nature (yes, it does!). But, it’s a manageable city. A friend once called it “a city with training wheels”. You can walk from one end of downtown to the other in less than an hour.

So, I brought these two things together into a little web experiment.

I started this site back in June and didn’t tell anyone about it. And then I just watched what happened. I didn’t promote it or anything at all. I was simply consistent and I tagged posts appropriately. Over the past few months, I’ve told a few friends and posted a few links on my Facebook and Twitter feeds without explicitly saying they’re my pictures.

The results?

Well, first off, considering that no promotion went into this at all, I’m quite impressed at how many people not only came but are now “following” and regularly “reblogging” photos they find on the site. I’ve also learned what I had always believed was the case: at the end of the day, people (even on the internet) really do reward quality. Almost without fail, it was the pictures I felt were best that inevitably got the most attention, without me having to do anything. The “filler” pictures I’d throw in now and then appropriately got no play.

One surprise? Consistency didn’t matter as much as quality. Recently, the picture that has received the most attention on the site was one that was both posted on a holiday and at the end of nearly a week of me not posting anything on the site. People just liked that the site was there, and didn’t “need” it to be there. When it has felt more like a joy rather than a responsibility to keep up with, it has seemed attractive.

So, consider today the coming out party for The Daily Philly. For any of you that were suspicious of this site using a lot of my pictures, now you know for sure that it’s me. There are weekly features like Coffee Fridays and Instagram Sundays, so look out for that.

And, I’ll answer the most common question people are asking me about this: yes, all of these pictures are taken with my cell phone. A nearly-three-year-old Droid X. I edit the pictures mostly all on my phone (many times posting while on-the-go), and only sometimes use basic editing features and filters on my desktop.

Also and lastly, I would love for this site to become a community project, so if you have any pictures of Philadelphia, please submit them! You can find the guidelines for these pictures at that link.

So click, bookmark, subscribe, RSS, “Follow“, “Like“, “+1“, or whatever else you might do  to keep with the site, and let me know what you think! Below, you’ll find some of my favorite pictures from the site.

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