In photos: Row, row, row your (cardboard) boat

In the final days of the school year, Casco Bay High School student teams were given the same amount of cardboard and duct tape to design and build their own boat. On Tuesday, the final day of school for ninth, 10th and 11th graders, the school held cardboard boat races at Willard Beach in South Portland. All photos by Staff Photographer Ben McCanna.

Best of May photo gallery: A month of contrasts

May is a month of life, when Maine throws off winter’s gray and emerges into a golden, green spring. Yet it always ends with Memorial Day, when we honor those who died fighting for our country. This year, May will be remembered for the murder of 21 people, including 19 children, in Uvalde, Texas, as well as 10 people killed at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. Here are some of the Press Herald’s best photos of May, many of them suffused with hope.

In photos: Slowly, slowly, signs of spring

Officially, the first day of spring in 2022 was March 20. In Maine, March and April bring snow, frost, rain, mud and summer-like warmth within the space of a few days. Our signs of spring, like opening day at Red’s Dairy Freeze or the first Sea Dogs game, are celebrated whatever the weather. And nothing is as sweet as hearing the birds sing and seeing the first daffodils bloom halfway through April.

In photos: The best of March photography

March is the month when winter officially ends, spring takes hold, and daylight savings time, well, saves us. This year, it also brought us the start of spring high school sports outdoors, our first ice cream at Red’s Dairy Freeze, and, the heartbreaking news from the war in Ukraine. Here are some of the best photos of the month by Press Herald photographers.

St. Patrick’s Day in photos: With pandemic restrictions lifted, Mainers say ‘sláinte!’

In photos: A memorable February

It snowed, and thawed, and sleeted and thawed, and snowed some more. On the 23rd, we claimed spring for a day, breaking records when the temperature soared to the mid-60s. It was a month of bad ice, high energy costs, good skiing and great high school sports. Here are some of the best photos from the month by Press Herald photographers.

In photos: See the action from Saturday’s high school basketball championships

The Skowhegan High girls went undefeated, the Nokomis boys and 6-foot-7 freshman Cooper Flagg showed us why they’ve been the top story in Maine sports all season, and the South Portland boys team won its first state title in 30 years. Here are some of our favorite photos from the final day of Maine’s high school basketball tournament.

The best Press Herald photography in January 2022

January is the time we settle into the start of real winter with its bone-chilling cold, its scant hours of daylight, its snow and ice. Take a look at some of our best photography from the month as entertainment during a time of isolation.

How a Press Herald photographer and Maine Twitter reunited a lost GoPro with its owner

I stumbled upon a mystery on Wednesday at Kettle Cove State Park in Cape Elizabeth: A GoPro lying on the beach like treasure buried in wet sand. I plucked it from the muck, and, to my surprise, it still worked. It even had 83 percent of its battery life left. As a photographer, I know […]

2021 Photos of the Year: Photographers’ Choice

2021 was a roller coaster ride. It started with mobs attacking the Capitol to try to overturn the presidential election and is ending with a new surge of the coronavirus. There was enough bad news – fires, floods, disasters of every natural and manmade kind – to make you want to bury your head under the covers and stay there. But there was also the miracle of vaccines – by the end of June, hardly any vaccinated people were dying of COVID-19. We gained a new appreciation of the simple but deep pleasures of meeting with family and friends, going to a country fair or a high school baseball game, looking for beauty in the flight of an owl or a solar eclipse at dawn. For our 2021 Photos of the Year collection, Portland Press Herald photographers voted on one another’s photos, then selected their own favorites from the top vote-getters. We hope you enjoy looking at them as much as we enjoyed taking them.