Wally Mason stops in the middle of the street, pats down the pockets of his jacket and rummages through a pack tied around his waist. Once he’s sure he has everything he needs, he picks up his tripod in one hand, camera in the other, and makes his way down the shadowy street. He speaks rapidly as he walks. Then, midsentence, he falls silent, sets up the tripod in the middle of the road and focuses his view camera on a white farmhouse.

Night has fallen on this quiet Bangor neighborhood, and to the untrained eye, there isn’t much to see. It doesn’t look like anyone is home, and the fa?ade is obscured, in part, by trees. But Mason isn’t looking at the house, he’s looking in the front yard, at a bright red blanket tossed over a pile of leaves. At least, they look like leaves.

“It begs the question, ‘Is there someone under there?'” Mason said, glancing at his watch to check the exposure.

By day, Mason, 51, works as curator for the University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor. By night, he creates his own art by turning his camera on deceptively mundane scenes. Taking pictures in the dark is a bit tricky – what you see isn’t what you get – but the results are arresting. A twilight sky looks sapphire blue on film. The camera transforms the cold glare of a streetlight into an acid yellow glow. And a backlit, curtained window? Well, that just looks creepy.

“When you see it, you wonder, ‘Is somebody being murdered in there?’ It’s really pathetic, but that’s what it comes down to,” Mason said.

That’s part of the appeal. One Maine art writer described his work as a union of David Lynch and Edward Hopper. His light-saturated photographs are at once serene and bizarre, always with a hint of danger.

“It is that undercurrent, that sense of unease, that I respond to,” said Bruce Brown, a peer of Mason’s who curates at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport. Mason’s work was prominently featured there in “I of the Eye,” which highlighted the work of seven Maine curators, and Brown said viewers responded to the unsettling duality of his photographs.

“On the one hand, you have a clean, well-lighted place, a sanctuary, inside the home,” Brown said. “At the same time there are almost more foreboding questions, at least for me: you never see the people. It’s like we are out on the prowl in the neighborhood.”

Just like Mason.

When the sun goes down, he takes to the streets, in search of the ordinary and the sublime. Over the last three years, he has gathered plenty of images – jurors selected two of them for the Portland Museum of Art biennial exhibition this spring – and some great stories.

There was the woman who came out of her house, gun in hand, when she saw Mason set up in the street near her home.

“She said, ‘What the hell are you doing? Well, you’d better do it somewhere else,'” he said, shaking his head and laughing.

He also had a close call with a German shepherd whose tether ended a foot from Mason’s tripod. And then there are the police. In Old Town, where Mason lives with his wife, Judith, and daughter, Grace, the police got used to the calls about a man with a camera, skulking through the streets late at night. But Bangor is another story. During a recent foray in one of the city’s less desirable neighborhoods, a cruiser pulled up as Mason headed back to his car. The officer was responding to a call from a passer-by, and Mason wasn’t surprised.

“It’s a little scary to be out at night, to be honest,” he said. “At night you don’t have the luxury of standing here forever. You’re always watching your back. I just get very nervous.”

Cars slow down when they pass Mason, and their drivers have a myriad of eyebrow-raising questions running through their minds: What is this guy doing here, in the dark, taking pictures of a house? Is he some kind of pervert? A peeping tom?

“You get the voyeurs who want to know what you’re doing,” Mason said.

This coming from a man who takes pictures of people’s houses in the dark. The irony of his comment isn’t lost on him.

“You don’t mean to be a voyeur, but it does have a tendency – I see more than I want to sometimes,” he said. “[But] my intent is not malicious.”

It all started as an experiment. Mason and his wife, who teaches photography at the University of Maine, were sitting outside of their Pushaw Lake camp, when he noticed an eerie glow coming from the neighbors’ yard. The floodlight next door cast a yellowish pall on the scene, and Wally wanted to see if he could capture it on film.

He had taken pictures when he was in graduate school, but he used them more as a sketchbook for his sculptures than as art. Years later, he wanted to experiment with photography in earnest, and that night, he found his inspiration.

“I find that where we live here has no appeal to me in terms of photography by day, and God knows, I’ve tried,” he said. “But at night it just opens up.”

At first, the night photographs were fairly unspectacular, but once he found the right combination of film and exposure, he knew he was onto something. Though he has no formal training as a photographer, Mason developed his own formula for success, and the results can be magical and mysterious.

On a recent evening, Mason was about to call it quits as he walked toward his car, lugging a heavy, boxy view camera uphill. He suddenly stopped and pointed to the full-moon sky ahead, framed by trees, with a streetlight shining on the corner.

“This is exactly what you hope for,” he said as he set up his tripod. “Oh my God, it’s just like a beacon. This is when film is cheap.”