A Walk Through Philly

This past Sunday I went a walk through the Rittenhouse Square area of Philadelphia. One of the great things about going to a school like Temple is you're only a short subway ride away from the heart of the city, with all of it's best features at your fingertips. After a bit of uncomfortable walking through the rain (next time my roommates and I will remember to check the weather forecast before we leave the apartment) we meandered our way down Walnut, wandered over to Chestnut and stopped for a quick bite to eat in the park.
The walk itself was fairly typical of any stroll throughout the city, but the fact that I knew I needed to photograph it definitely changed the way I looked at things. Feeling a bit touristy, I had my camera clutched in my right hand for the duration of the trip and I found myself searching for things I deemed interesting enough to photograph. I found myself looking up a lot more, trying to find good shots of the buildings above and looking at the scenic park below. The objects I collected are things that I acquired throughout the day from shops I visited and places I stopped by.
This is my second year at Temple and I've lived less than an hour's drive from the city my whole life but I realized while going on this walk that I kind of take it for granted. This was probably the first time out of the hundred times I've visited the city that I actually bothered to stop and take a picture of something. Typically I'm too busy chatting or moving about or planning my next step that I never really think to document the experiences I have in the city.
The pictures themselves are nothing crazy. I don't have an amazing eye for photography so most of what I came up with were scenic views of the park or views of the buildings and sidewalk that I found interesting. But looking back on them it's definitely cool to see a picture I took and think, "I remember exactly when I took that, why I took that, and what I was doing when it happened." To me that's the best part of photographs. The images themselves are nice, but more often the memories associated with them are even better.