Phew What A Scorcher!

Headed out in a new direction on the streets of Riverside today and it turned out well. Any one of four images could have featured as my blip of the day.

In the end it came down to two images and a lot of soul searching as to whether I went for the artistic image or the reportage image.

I guess after years working as a journalist, old habits die hard and the reportage photograph won out. It's the kind of thing that would feature in newspapers, perhaps not in America, but certainly back home in the UK.

In Britain the weather is always news. In June 1976 when a heatwave brought temperatures above 90 degrees for 15 consecutive days, The Sun newspaper ran the front page headline "Phew What A Scorcher!"

The phrase has since passed into common usage and on hot summer days while working on The Birmingham Post in the 1990s, the newsroom would resound with cries of "Phew what a scorcher!"

It is not every day that a girl in a bikini is seen sunbathing on a roof in Riverside, Jacksonville. A good picture editor would use this kind of shot and it would probably run as a front page caption story.

That's my excuse for choosing this picture and I am sticking to it. :-)

Zeiss Planar T* ZE 1,4/50.