Photographer

At 26, Nick Waplington is young enough to enjoy skateboarding and too young to be as good a photographer as he is. Judging by the current exhibition of his work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he seems to have sprung full-blown from the brow of Henri Cartier-Bresson or Robert Frank, except that Waplington doesn't owe anything to either of them. At least he says he doesn't. "At various stages throughout my career (imagine, at 26, talking about a career) I've been interested in various different photographers, until I got to the point where I wasn't interested in anyone anymore, and it was about time for me to go out there and do something different," he said the other day while a museum installation crew was putting the finishing touches on his show.

SOME CALL HIM the Gordon Parks of Philly. To others, he's "Mr. Tribune. " Whatever you call Robert Mendelsohn, you'd be hard-pressed to find an African-American-oriented society event in recent years that he hasn't photographed for the Philadelphia Tribune , the Philadelphia Sunday Sun or another one of the papers he shoots for as a freelancer. And he does it all using public transportation. "He goes to places at nighttime that I wouldn't go without a car," laughed Jerry Mondesire, publisher of the Philadelphia Sunday Sun . "The beauty of it is that he gets along with so many kinds of people.

Daily News photographer Elwood P. Smith, with wife Anne on the left, throws out the first ball before last night's Phillies-Cardinals game. Smith was honored by the Phillies for his 50 years of photographing baseball, and his peers commemorated the occasion by using cameras from another era.

10 tonight BRAVO Celebrated photographer Andres Serrano (right), no stranger to controversy for his 1987 photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine, joins Jerry Saltz, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Bill Powers and China Chow on the judges panel.

The assignment to photograph a wedding is not to be given, or taken, lightly. The photographer should be a professional, and equipped with both the gear and the skills to handle every moment. The photographer who shoots a wedding candidly like a news event can often outperform the more structured "studio" shooters, who prefer posed situations. However, some studios do offer 35mm, photojournalism-style wedding coverage. The photojournalism approach - letting the wedding events unfold and photographing them as they happen - often results in a more memorable set of pictures than those taken by a photographer who tries to photograph the standard ceremonial situations with which he is familiar.

Photographers sometimes become so caught up in their search for good subjects that they overlook an obvious one - their families and friends. It is sometimes difficult for a photographer to take a picture of someone he knows, but the familiarity of the subject makes the pictures all the more worthwhile and meaningful. Pictures of family and friends have a special quality. As time passes, pictures become documentary treasures; it's informative and amusing to see how friends and loved ones looked, dressed and acted.

This month for National Poetry Month, photographer Peter Tobia asked students in his photojournalism class at University of the Arts to illustrate a line or a verse from several Bob Dylan songs. "We have spent the whole semester shooting assignments that documented subjects and life situations as they unfold in front of the camera," said Tobia, formerly an Inquirer photographer. "The photographs have been fair, accurate, and honest. I thought I would change it up a little with this assignment and give the students a free rein of coming up with any kind of image to illustrate an idea, a thought, or emotion from something they have read.

We train ourselves from birth to see objects, not light, but it is the light reflected from objects that enables us to see them. Photographers often take pictures because they like the way the light plays on a scene or subject, and the good ones learn to "see" the way their film does. They study scenes carefully, analyzing the highlights and looking carefully into shadows. The photographer must visualize scenes not as they are, but as they will appear in the finished photograph.

A camera, however expensive or sophisticated, does not a photographer make. That point has been made here, in varying degrees of shrillness, no fewer than a dozen times in the last year alone, but it bears repeating. The photographer has to learn to see, to think, to compose through the viewfinder, and to move around to get the best photographs. The photographer who does all these well will find almost any camera an adequate tool. In other words, photographers need to worry less about the special gear they think they need and more about training themselves to use the cameras they already have.

The three most commonly photographed subjects are children, cats and sunsets, in that order. The judges of a recent national snapshot contest studied thousands of entries and then commented that top prize should have gone to any photographer who could put all three elements into a single composition - a child tossing a cat into the sunset. Baby pictures have universal appeal. Babies change so much from week to week that some parents make a weekly photo chronicle of their children's progress.