A school lockout, bike (tricked out), a porcupine and a pear tree
A pair of compact 35mm cameras, one of which the author tries to keep in a front pocket or otherwise nearby.
LINCOLNVILLE – Skid marks.
BELFAST – Handy Woman Service.
BELFAST – Workers restore the Cedar Street greenhouse that served a succession of florists. The building is now a private residence.
HOPE – Sweetland Center under construction, seen from behind one of the pear tree namesakes of Sweet Tree Arts, the community arts organization that plans to call the building home.
BELFAST – Parking lot, old Upper Bridge Crossing. A new sign marks the future site of the Passy Greenway, a recreational trail slated to replace the railroad tracks outside of Belfast. On the ground, a sign for the excursion train rides that currently operate on the track.
SEARSMONT – Porcupine, Belmont town line.
BELFAST – Sean Lynch of Belfast traded in his mountain bike to make his own 1960s-style “muscle bike." He picked red to contrast with the black and chrome. A glow wire on the frame was out of order. “It looked pretty good when it was lit up at night, too,” he said.
BELFAST – Flu shots.
MONROE – The parking lot of Monroe Elementary School after a late-running Regional School Unit 3 meeting at which two employees brought grievance appeals before the school board.
BELFAST – The former railroad building that was home to the Belfast Maskers theater group until last year when it was declared unsafe. With the recent sale of the Belfast Boatyard, the city-owned building now lies sandwiched between two Front Street Shipyard properties.
BELFAST – Volunteers outside Belfast Center unload cases of surplus canned goods from the USDA to be used in the Belfast Soup Kitchen.
BELFAST – Storage room, Waldo County Republican Party headquarters, several days before the official opening.
BELFAST – Lauren Smith, a waitress at La Vida, foreground, chats with upstairs resident Philip Golgano outside the restaurant during her break.
BELFAST – One of a number of new signs put up by the city this year to draw visitors into the downtown. At the Searsport town line, an old, white-backed "Welcome to Belfast" sign is visible in the distance.
BELFAST – A pair of yellow Volkswagen Beetles flank a truck with a pair of yellow and black yin yang bumper stickers
BELFAST – Librarian Sea Chauvin talks with a student in a the storage room of the Captain Albert Stevens School library during a schoolwide lockout, called after an unknown truck appeared twice outside the school. It was the first such incident of the year.
STOCKTON SPRINGS – With the Church Street bridge returning (left), fundraising underway for a new steeple on the Community Church (background, right), and plans before the school board to keep the elementary school afloat, Stockton seems to be coming together again.
BELFAST – Shopping cart.
A pair of compact 35mm cameras, one of which the author tries to keep in a front pocket or otherwise nearby.
LINCOLNVILLE – Skid marks.
BELFAST – Handy Woman Service.
BELFAST – Workers restore the Cedar Street greenhouse that served a succession of florists. The building is now a private residence.
HOPE – Sweetland Center under construction, seen from behind one of the pear tree namesakes of Sweet Tree Arts, the community arts organization that plans to call the building home.
BELFAST – Parking lot, old Upper Bridge Crossing. A new sign marks the future site of the Passy Greenway, a recreational trail slated to replace the railroad tracks outside of Belfast. On the ground, a sign for the excursion train rides that currently operate on the track.
SEARSMONT – Porcupine, Belmont town line.
BELFAST – Sean Lynch of Belfast traded in his mountain bike to make his own 1960s-style “muscle bike." He picked red to contrast with the black and chrome. A glow wire on the frame was out of order. “It looked pretty good when it was lit up at night, too,” he said.
BELFAST – Flu shots.
MONROE – The parking lot of Monroe Elementary School after a late-running Regional School Unit 3 meeting at which two employees brought grievance appeals before the school board.
BELFAST – The former railroad building that was home to the Belfast Maskers theater group until last year when it was declared unsafe. With the recent sale of the Belfast Boatyard, the city-owned building now lies sandwiched between two Front Street Shipyard properties.
BELFAST – Volunteers outside Belfast Center unload cases of surplus canned goods from the USDA to be used in the Belfast Soup Kitchen.
BELFAST – Storage room, Waldo County Republican Party headquarters, several days before the official opening.
BELFAST – Lauren Smith, a waitress at La Vida, foreground, chats with upstairs resident Philip Golgano outside the restaurant during her break.
BELFAST – One of a number of new signs put up by the city this year to draw visitors into the downtown. At the Searsport town line, an old, white-backed "Welcome to Belfast" sign is visible in the distance.
BELFAST – A pair of yellow Volkswagen Beetles flank a truck with a pair of yellow and black yin yang bumper stickers
BELFAST – Librarian Sea Chauvin talks with a student in a the storage room of the Captain Albert Stevens School library during a schoolwide lockout, called after an unknown truck appeared twice outside the school. It was the first such incident of the year.
STOCKTON SPRINGS – With the Church Street bridge returning (left), fundraising underway for a new steeple on the Community Church (background, right), and plans before the school board to keep the elementary school afloat, Stockton seems to be coming together again.
BELFAST – Shopping cart.
The photos in the gallery below were taken during the past week with a pocket-sized 35mm, kept on hand for such occasions as you'll see. There is no overarching idea to the collection except that of recording some of the stuff that doesn't fall neatly below a headline.
For the most part, what you see is the exposures of a single roll of film, give or take a photo here and there. Hence the name Contact Sheet, which refers to the single sheet of paper onto which a photographer would print a roll's worth of negatives, actual size, for the purpose of previewing them and selecting the best for enlargements.
This contact sheet is a little different in that I'm generally limiting myself to one exposure per image. It's a bit of a gamble and an experiment and hopefully enjoyable to look through.
Like everyone else I have a digital camera, and there’s also a camera on my phone. I'm grateful for both. But the pictures that come back from a roll of 35mm film always seem more special, as though the moment were more gently captured.
Maybe it’s the delayed gratification of having to wait. Maybe there's a mental compensation for the fact of having to pay money to see the pictures. Whatever the reason, there’s a roll of the dice. There’s the image as imagined in the time between the click of the shutter and when the images are finally developed. And sometimes there’s magic.
Over the years I've tried a bunch of film cameras. Some unquestionably produce nicer images than the Olympus XA-2 and and Olympus Infinity Stylus Epic pictured at right, but in the spirit of an old photographers' axiom (the best camera is the one you use) these are my best cameras.
Recently I started keeping one or the other in my pocket. Between all the events that are big or complex enough to warrant a story, there are hundreds of interstitial moments where something is happening. Sometime impossibly small but always part of the bigger story. Just a few of those appear here.
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Event Date
Address
United States
