John Boal Photography

Now that I've gotten into the swing of things at the News & Messenger , I put together a group of images representing last week's work. A full list of stuff, I might add. I also think that it's pretty representative of what we do on a week to week basis. Sports. Sports portraits. Funerals, vigils. I suppose the only thing missing was a parade, a groundbreaking or a ribbon-cutting... Monday began like many others...sportraits. This time of a fella who's broken his leg two years in a row... A last minute "Drive-by" portrait... And finishing off at a restaurant... Tuesday Night hoops against an Australian team... ....and some Wednesday night hoops... Thursday brought the Football Player of the Year, Jerrell McFadden... ...and then I was off to shoot a portrait for the gymnastics preview... ...then finally finishing off the night with...yep, more hoops action, this time at a small Catholic School in Manassas City. What an interesting, small gym... Friday s...

I’ve never considered myself to be much of a sports shooter. I love sports, but I just can’t seem to come away with any great sports images. But the nice thing about sports is that the same opportunities will always present themselves. If you go to enough baseball games, you’re going to get one of the shortstop diving for a grounder. But events, while they may come along often, always present themselves with unique storylines. Saturday night was one of those events. The Virginia high school state championship was held at Lane Stadium on the VA Tech campus. And to top it all off, I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express (spoiler alert: there may be a bad joke somewhere in the future…). Part of the charm of working for a community newspaper is that events like these happen often. With about a million high schools in the county, someone is bound to go to “states” at some point in the year. It happened several times in York, when I was an intern, and that was only a six month internship. Last ni...

Living in the DC metro area means that often I have the opportunity to see a lot of incredible photojournalists present their work. A couple nights back at the National Geographic headquarters, I had the opportunity to see Reza, and his presentation promoting his retrospective book, War + Peace. I only knew a little of his work, before his presentation. He has spent the better part of his life either photographically or directly working, as part of the UN, in regions devastated by war. And his work is truly wonderful…and sad. Seeing his work, and hearing his stories truly made me reflect on how fortunate I am, and how fortunate we are, as a nation. Despite the economic meltdown, we live in a country where we have access to the basic needs. Most of us, that is. There are those that live in the margins. And I started to think of them as Reza talked. But nothing I could think of could approach what these people in Afghanistan have been through in the past 25 years. Or the people of Saraje...

Here are a collection of photos I’ve worked on the first couple weeks at the news & messenger. Mostly portraits, something I haven’t been too comfortable as I’ve developed over the past couple years. However, I’ve become much more comfortable with them lately, and it mostly has to do with strobist.com and understanding off-camera lighting. I tried to take these opportunities to really come up with better portraits. I can’t necessarily consider these to be incredibly unique in any way, but the quality of the lighting has gotten better. The only unfortunate consequence of all these portraits is that they’ve mostly been squeezed into the schedule and I haven’t been able to use my 4x5. Since the schedule has started to even out a bit, hopefully I can find some time and work in some film… Principal bets students they can't raise $12000 over 3 weeks in September. Students raise $12k. Principal gets slimed... Part of an "Unsung Heroes" piece on local volunteers for high sch...