Love it or hate it, winter is here, in all its icy glory. When you are freezing outside – your feet like stone, your fingers like marble – consider the miracle of ice. Water, liquid and gas, made solid. Look closely and you’ll find its otherworldly beauty.
Gregory Rec
Staff Photographer
Gregory got his start in journalism delivering his hometown newspaper, the Norwich Bulletin, as a teenager, reading the front page articles on dark winter mornings as he passed under streetlights.
Greg worked as a photojournalist at a weekly newspaper group in Connecticut for three years before attending the University of Montana to study journalism and Spanish. He interned at the Portland Press Herald in the summer of 1995 and the Boston Globe the following year.
He was hired at the Press Herald in 1997 and over the past 20 years, he has photographed throughout Maine, covered the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in New York City, twice embedded with Maine Army National Guard troops in Iraq, covered the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. In 2004, Rec was named Journalist of the Year with columnist Bill Nemitz by the Maine Press Association for their work in Iraq. After only ten years at the Press Herald, he won the Master Photographer award from the New England Society of Newspaper Editors, an award usually reserved for veteran photographers.
In photos: Making it snow at Sunday River
In theory, making snow is simple. In reality, making it on a mountain where temperatures can be in the single digits or subzero is an exercise in the saying, “What can go wrong will go wrong.” Pumps fail, lines burst, connections don’t connect or any part of the system can freeze. Press Herald photographer Greg Rec photographs a night with some of the snowmakers at Sunday River Ski Resort in Newry.
Consider the lowly gull: A photo essay
Gulls are often maligned as “rats of the sky,” but is that assessment warranted? Isn’t there beauty in their plaintive calls? Aren’t they as evocative of the coast as salt air, foghorns, bell buoys, lobster boats and lighthouses?
Or are they simply too common, too messy and too pushy to deserve our admiration?
Gulls, love them or hate them, are smart, fascinating, even beautiful, as our gallery shows. Just don’t call them seagulls. Birders will tell you there is no such animal.