This will be a recurring column by The Daily Item Creative Director Spenser Hasak, featuring and discussing his favorite photos of the month.
Despite hating the heat, July is one of my favorite months as a photojournalist. The world seems to come alive again with parties, fireworks, and outdoor adventures. There never seems to be a shortage of interesting snippets of life to capture.
1) My favorite pic of the month goes to an image I made of Darrell Henson, of Lynn, as he was blowing bubbles during East Baptist Church’s Vacation Bible School. I’m still not sure how I got this timing so right, but each time I look at the way the bubbles perfectly align with his eyes and mouth a huge smile cracks across my face. I hope it has the same effect on you!
2-3) Lynn/Swampscott’s Fourth of July fireworks display (held July 3) also makes the list. The publisher and I had a plan for one fireworks photo to take up the entirety of the front page for the July 4 edition, but then Mother Nature decided to throw us a curveball. With a storm front moving in, I wasn’t even sure the fireworks display would happen and I was frantically wracking my brain to come up with a back-up plan. Mother Nature took care of that. The first image included shows her own Fourth of July demonstration as lightning streaked across the sky before the fireworks over Red Rock Park. The image that did make the front page also made the cut. I had packed up all my gear and was scrambling back to the office to edit my photos before deadline when this bright yellow umbrella caught my eye along Lynn Shore Drive. To me, it perfectly summed up the evening, and I had about 30 seconds to get a photo before the woman holding the umbrella collapsed it and tucked it away for the evening. A little rain and lightning wasn’t going to stop the crowd from enjoying the occasion.
4) As I was walking up to Lynn Harbor Park on its opening day, the first thing I saw was this family running up and down the side of one of the hills. I loved the drama with the clouds behind and the silhouetted figures below. Watching the kids run back and forth sent me 20 years back in time, imagining myself with my younger brother and sister doing just the same.
5) Rounding out the Pics of the Month we find Terrence Cullinane as he paddle boards around Goldfish Pond in Lynn. This story was a reminder of why I love this job so much — I never know what I’ll be doing each day or what interesting person I may run into. I bumped into Cullinane as he was leaving Sluice Pond the day prior and we struck up a conversation. He told me he planned on paddle boarding all the bodies of water in Lynn and I knew right away that it would be a fun story to share with our readers.
