Roger Stevens remembers the exact date he finished his job at the mill.

“June 24, 1999,” he said with a smile, sitting in his store in downtown Lincoln.

After 21 years at Lincoln Pulp and Paper Co., Stevens said goodbye to his co-workers, his steady paycheck and his benefits, and punched his timecard for the last time. He was 40 years old. It was time for a change.

“It’s the biggest risk I ever took in my life,” said Stevens, now 42. “I laid in bed at night many nights, staring at the ceiling, wondering if it was the right thing to do. It’s scary giving up that much security.”

Lincoln is primarily a mill town. There’s a hospital, some stores and a few restaurants there, and on a sunny day, people bustle about the sidewalks. The mill isn’t the only game in town, but it’s the biggest.

It’s a game Stevens had known his whole life. Stevens grew up in Lincoln. His dad worked at the mill. After graduating from vocational school, Stevens got married and worked as a manager at Woolworth’s in Millinocket. Despite his father’s objections, he moved back a few years later to work at the mill.

“He really didn’t want me to work at the mill, but the money was so enticing, [as was] the fact that everybody who lived here was so tied to the mill.”

So he worked his way up the ranks and eventually became an electrician. He liked it there – he made a lot of good friends and he enjoyed the work. All the while, he took pictures – of moose and birds, the mill, falling-down barns, flowers, his family and pretty much everything else that crossed his viewfinder. It was just something he did, all the time, since he was a boy.

“I wanted to be a photojournalist in high school,” he said. “That was my dream. I wanted to be a photographer. I thought that would be so cool.”

After a little digging around near his desk at Maine Focus Photography, he pulled out a handmade photo album that he entered in a 4-H competition in 1974.

“I can remember winning a blue ribbon for this,” he said, flipping through the faded pages mounted with black-and-white pictures.

More than 25 years later, his photos are again winning blue ribbons, this time in regional wildlife art competitions. Recently, he placed first at the Topsfield, Mass., wildlife color photography competition. Two weeks ago, he entered 10 photos in the State of Maine Sportsman’s Show. Eight of them placed. His work was recently on display for a month in the State House.

“It was a blast,” Stevens said of hanging his photographs in Augusta. “It’s like a dream.”

Everything about the past two years has felt like a dream to Stevens. Since he left the mill to pursue his passion for photography, things have seemed to fall into place. When he’s not on the road competing in wildlife art contests, he’s at fairs and sidewalk art shows selling his photos. He’s found shops and galleries around the state to carry his work. He also opened his own shop in Lincoln to display his photos. He even finds time to go out and shoot, though he says that he had more time for that when he worked at the mill.

“It’s pretty exciting,” Stevens said. “It’s been less than two years and it just amazes me sometimes how fast it’s taking place.”

Sitting in his shop, surrounded by photographs that he and his wife hand-framed and matted, Stevens smiles like a little kid. Everything about him is relaxed, from his jeans and sandals with socks, to his easy manner of speaking. Not bad for a guy who used to think no one would like, let alone pay money for, his pictures.

“We’re always the last ones to believe we’re worthy,” he said.

His second wife, Julie Housum-Stevens, and daughter, Kimberly, knew Stevens had talent – a lot more talent than other people they had seen selling stuff at craft fairs. So when Mattanawcook Academy had its homecoming fair, they urged him to set up a booth with his photos. He, of course, wanted nothing to do with that.

“I’d come up with every excuse in the world for why I couldn’t do it,” Stevens said, but his wife and daughter said they’d sit at the booth even if he couldn’t go. “I said, ‘Oh rats, I’m not going to be able to get out of this.'”

He went down to the fair to see them, and most of his photos were gone. He thought he might be on to something, so he decided to go to a few more shows. When he went to one in Bar Harbor, he did “exceptionally well.”

“I thought, ‘Well, I may be able to make a living at this,'” he said.

His wife is a teacher at Mattanawcook Junior High School, so she had benefits and a steady income. But more important, she believed he could do it.

“We talked it over and we knew it was going to be a struggle,” he said. “Without the support she’s given me morally, spiritually and financially, I wouldn’t be able to do it.”

He booked a few shows the weekend after he left the mill, and he did well. Then he went to Kennebunkport. He made $50, tops, all day.

“All the way home, chugging up the Interstate, I thought, ‘Oh, this is awful,'” he said. “At first it was very, very scary. You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”

Things picked up after that. When business got slow, Stevens worked as a substitute teacher and he did the census. Things were tight for a little while, but he and Julie got by.

“My wife calls it the best midlife crisis she’s ever heard of,” Stevens said. “I just knew I wanted to do something. I never thought this would be the thing that would carry me out of there.”

Housum-Stevens remembers the first time her husband talked about changing his career.

“I was in the shower one night, after cross-country practice, and he hollered in, ‘How much do you make at your job?'” she said. “I told him and he said, ‘Once you get over this amount, I’m going to quit the mill,’ and I just about dropped the soap.”

She knew he was serious, and though it took a while for him to finally convince himself he was ready, Housum-Stevens said it was worth the wait. When she thinks about the change she’s seen in her husband, she has a hard time putting it into words. She gets emotional talking about it because it didn’t only affect his career, it affected their marriage.

“He’s not the man I married, and I loved the man I married,” she said. “He’s more calm within himself. He’s more calm outside himself. He walks around more satisfied.

“There’s a maturity, a serenity, a sense of discipline,” she said. “He can structure his life more now. … there is a balance there that was missing before.”

Housum-Stevens said that by taking pictures, her husband gets a sense of fulfillment that wasn’t possible before, no matter how happy he was at the mill.

“Happiness isn’t even the answer,” she said. “He’s contributing something to the world that he just wasn’t doing before.”

Though some of them couldn’t understand why he’d leave the money and benefits behind, Stevens’ friends at work supported his decision as well. They figured if anyone could pull it off, Roger could.

“I could see his pictures evolving, getting better quality,” said Kerwin Whitney, who worked with Stevens for 20 years at Lincoln Pulp and Paper. “I told him, ‘It’s kind of a scary thought. Here you are, working in a very well-paying job, making good money, getting benefits. … [But] you definitely have a talent there. I think you’ll do well.’

“That kind of a career is not something that a lot of people can put a finger on. People thought, ‘I know he takes good pictures, but can he make a living at it?'”

Whitney knew Stevens could succeed as a photographer. He had other concerns.

“I told him when he left, ‘I hope you do well, but don’t forget your friends. I still need a fishing partner,” he said, laughing.

Part of the reason why Stevens has been so successful, Whitney says, is because he’s an outdoorsman first and a photographer second.

“He knows where to go, how to find it, how to approach it,” Whitney said. “He can walk by something and see something that you or I would never notice was there.”

Now, when Whitney and Stevens embark on an outdoor adventure, they both make sure to take two things: their fishing rods and their cameras. Stevens has encouraged Whitney to take pictures and enter them in the same wildlife art shows he competes in. During the State of Maine Sportsman’s Show, Whitney got an honorable mention.

“That says a lot about Roger,” Whitney said. “He’s kind of opened my eyes. You seem to notice more in nature when you’re looking for things to take a picture of. … I just told him when he gets famous and gets to go on these National Geographic trips, ‘Don’t forget me, I’d love to go too.'”

Until then, Stevens has other projects to keep him busy. He just had four pictures printed in “The Feeder Watcher’s Guide to Bird Feeding” by Margaret Barker and Jack Griggs, and he may do work for another book on blue jays.

“It’s all neat stuff,” he said. “It’s a way to get your name out there.”

Unless he’s taking pictures there, Stevens doesn’t plan on returning to his old workplace anytime soon. He’s no longer worried about getting by, and given the mill’s recent filing for Chapter 11 protection, a steady paycheck there isn’t a sure thing anymore. If he’s going to live with financial uncertainty, he figures he may as well do something he loves.

“I may never be a millionaire doing this, but I’ll tell you right now, I’m definitely enjoying a better quality of life,” Stevens said. “The people I’ve met and the places I’ve been in the past couple of years, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. … You can’t put a monetary value on that. … It was the right thing to do. There’s no doubt in my mind.”