locals in the student government office: Killer, Steve, and John.

on the occasion of the 30th high school reunion year, 2006, for the intrepid Class of '76, this series of more than 400 images represented my first public foray into photography as the photo editor for the Sail On -- the Gaithersburg High School Yearbook for the school year 1975-76 -- and it culminated with the publication of an award-winning issue of the yearbook as compiled by editors Wendy Chamberlin and Kathy Marshall, the rest of the dedicated yearbook staff, and as overseen by Dave "Fearless Leader" Sampselle, English teacher and our intrepid guide.



the images are technically difficult to look at, 30 years on -- dusty, scratched, improperly developed, and poorly framed -- but what wonders Photoshop can do with bad negatives! if only we had that technology 'back then.' and it's clear that the cumulative view is of my own high school experience, with my friends appearing more often than not. there is no particular chronological order as I didn't have a consequent cataloging system for my negatives way back when. looking back, it would be nice to see all the photos that anyone made that year, to get a more democratic view of the time. matter of fact -- if you have some images to add, let me know -- see address below.

sadly, at least a couple of those young kids found here are no longer walking this fragile earth, and it is to them that these memories are dedicated: Richard Thomson (1958 - 1987), John Wester (1958 - 2006). To complete this list, well, doubtful that this is possible, but Joe Degnan, and Cathy Peterson apparently have passed on, as well as Eric Wolle who died in 2004.

please help! I did not have access to my yearbook, so I decided basically NOT to put any names on the photos until I was TOTALLY sure of who it was and the proper spelling, so if you see anything that should be captioned (which is everything) -- reference the number at the beginning of the caption and send to neo < at > neoscenes < dot > net -- and I'll add that info to the photos.

yours truly

FINALLY, here it is already October 2008, and it's done. the blinding grunt work of scanning and retouching and getting this stuff up and going -- another thing to cross off the TO DO list. why precisely I did the whole project which took many many tens of hours, I don't really know. "get a life!" might be a reasonable line. "lest we forget" might be another. forget what? hopefully we would not be doomed to repeat history, though some of it was great fun! in the end it seems to be an exercise in merely using these small scraps of that distant time to make the initial process back then not seem a waste. what are memories anyway but the internal persistence of energized reflections of what once was... perhaps these fragments will re-energize some of your internal reflections on what you, what we, once were...

as for me, the next task, along with hunting for a job, is to move on to the next batch of images -- from the Colorado School of Mines where I did my undergraduate studies in geophysics and where I was Special Editor & Head Photographer for the newspaper and yearbook. For the latest thoughts and images, please visit my long-running travelog-blog. and then there are the hundreds of rolls shot across Europe and North Amurika in the intervening 30 years. what of those? (sorry this links is down) it occurs to me that with 400+ photos in a simple html interface , it's a pain in the arse to find any particular one -- so I decided to create a more up-to-date gallery interface with thumbnails and a slide-show option which you can find HERE instead.