JULY 5: A disproportionate amount of these photos are from Oak Bluffs, because that’s where I live, and at the end of the day it’s my go-to location for photos. I stopped by the Inkwell Beach on my way home from work on Friday to take a nap and read my Sports Illustrated (it was supposed to be the reverse order, but I was tired…), and took this picture while I was there.

JULY 6: Right around this time of the summer you started to see a lot of fundraising events show up on the MV calendar. One of them was the Sail MV seafood buffet and auction, which I had never covered before. I do, however, cover the sailing team that Sail MV funds, and it was nice to see how much money was raised for the kids on the team this evening. Since I was covering the event I couldn’t partake in the tasty buffet part, but that lobster looked pretty tasty…

JULY 7: More work from the Steamship project. I decided to ride the ferries on the Sunday after the Fourth, when everybody would be traveling back to the mainland–I’d never seen the boats that crowded before. People were sitting in the windowsills below decks! But the best part of this ride over was definitely these guys. I saw the carrier when everybody was lined up to leave, and thought there would be a cat inside, but nope- ferrets! So I had to take their picture, and happily one of the photos made it into the final edit. Ferrets on a ferry is almost as good as goats on a boat.

JULY 8: The Tisbury Street Fair is a crowded affair; it feels like the entire Island is packed onto Main Street to eat fried dough and shop the sales. But midway through the event, people backed up to give Johnny Hoy and Bluefish space to perform.

JULY 9: I left work for the day without having a photo under my belt (it was ‘Write Steamship Story’ day), so I took the long way home and stopped by the East Chop Lighthouse. The lighthouses–there are six on the Island–are very popular locales for family portraits, and that’s just what was happening when I showed up.

JULY 10: Another day, another last-minute photo taken. It helps when one of the Black Dog tall ships is anchored offshore, though.

JULY 11: I got a last-minute assignment to go photograph Jim Belushi (he’s a summer resident here) doing improv with the local teen troupe here. I wrote a piece on the IMP teens earlier this year, before they participated in the Chicago Improv Festival, and they are damn funny, so it was fun to watch their zaniness bounce off Belushi’s energy.

JUNE 21: After yet another week of rain, the sun came out for the first day of summer! I am posting two photos today to make up for the Week Three’s Thursday failure. The first was just a people-watching moment at the Inkwell, the second an enterprising kiddo from New Jersey who collected shells and rocks, painted them in festive colors, and sold them to earn money for the arcade. He made quite a few sales, too–helps when your product is low-cost yet pretty.

JUNE 22: I went to the Little League championship games today, which were a ton of fun. There’s both a minor league and a major league game, and they both have their selling points…pretty much anything can happen in the minors (like this ball in the above photo), and the scores are generally much higher because nobody has quite mastered pitching yet. The majors are much more polished, and typically are all about pitchers’ duels, although that didn’t happen this year. In both cases, the number one team from the season walked away with the championship. No upsets!

JUNE 23: Rise dancers present their teachers with thank-you bouquets after their annual summer performance. The show is long, but the dancers are immensely talented and the choreography and costumes wicked impressive. I finally maneuvered into a decent seat in the auditorium right at the end of the show, so this was one of the photos I  liked best.

JUNE 24: I wrote a story this week about fast food on Martha’s Vineyard, and since there are no actual franchise fast food places here, I went to a lot of clam shacks. This was at the Quarterdeck in Edgartown, where they have fried Oreos…

JUNE 25: This week was a bit of a slam for me, and I forgot to take photos on Wednesday AND Thursday. So today gets three photos, all from the clam shacks project. The first is at Nancy’s in OB, on the harbor, the second a delicious lobster roll (YUM), and the third a photo of James and Faith and their daughter at their shack up on the Aquinnah cliffs. Portraits are not exactly my strong suit, so I was very happy with how the last one turned out.