City skyline at solstice time | Scene Through the Lens

The day the earth was tilted the farthest away from the sun resulted in the shortest day of the year for us in the Northern Hemisphere.

I made the skyline photo after spending almost an entire day at our city council as they held a final hearing and voted on a $$1.3 billion downtown sports arena. Leaving in the parking garage I missed the turnout to exit and ended up having to go all the way up to the roof to start going back down.

The view of the early darkness and the light of the skyline stopped me, and as I got out of my car to make a picture (just because…) I saw the single car on the other side turn on their lights and scrambled to run up the ramp to compose it better.

The day with the fewest hours of sunlight is also the day with the longest night, a reminder of the struggles of unhoused people. On Saturday the annual Homeless Remembrance Blanket Project displayed hundreds of homemade blankets in front of Independence Mall in a show of solidarity and generosity with the more than half a million Americans experiencing homelessness.

Finally, the start of winter also marks the end of the year, and the traditional look back over the what we’ve seen. Inquirer photographers and videographers captured tens of thousands of images in 2024. Here is our year-end “Best Of” gallery of some of our favorites.

» READ MORE: The Inquirer’s best photos of 2024

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: