John Boal Photography

I work in Northern Virginia. This means that often I am in contact with the military or retired military. Today was a case that I met 84 year-old retired Marine Corps Sgt. Major John Henry, a veteran of three wars (WWII, Korea & Vietnam). He was certainly a fascinating character. Like many I’ve met over the years, he was very proud of his service and had more stories than you could hear in a single sitting. He was shot twice, although he refused the Purple Heart, because, as he said, “I didn’t feel nothin’, and there were a lot more guys that got it worse than I did…” He delighted in recounting stories which sounded horrifying to me (think death and destruction), and yet, he was as cheerful as any 84 year-old you’d ever met. In fact, if it weren’t for his crew cut, you may not know he was a veteran if you met him on the street. Although, admittedly, I don’t know what veterans are supposed to look like. I guess, maybe many veterans are similar in that way. Walking vaults, filled wit...

About a week ago, the News & Messenger published the final in a series of All-Area athletes of the year. It only took about a month to get 12 pages out. Blame the economy, blame advertising. We just didn't have enough pages to make space for the page on many days. The athlete pages ended up appearing as a disjointed, discontinuous stream of pages sometimes shown consecutively for three days, only to appear again 10 days later. But that's the state of newspapers, and I'll get back to that. What I did want to highlight were my pictures. Hopefully that's why you look at these pages, and not to hear about how bad the paper is doing. Or maybe both. Scheduling these times to shoot the athletes inevitably is the biggest pain in the ass to do. This becomes especially hectic at the end of the school year, when we also have to cover every single graduation ceremony in the county. The first I had the opportunity to shoot was the Female Scholar Athlete of the Year, Meredith Ne...

About a week ago or so, I had the opportunity to photograph some Peregrine Falcon chicks as some conservation biologists checked up on the young at a Dominion Power Plant here in Prince William County. There are only about 20 nesting pairs in Virginia, so it felt pretty neat to first take some pictures of the falcons, and then I had the chance to hold one for a few minutes while reporter Aileen Streng took a couple photos.