John Boal Photography

I'm not young anymore. At least I don't feel it anymore. No more crazy parties. No more running around the city like a lunatic. In fact there was no alcohol consumed on this Halloween at all. Still trying to figure out if that's a first since my freshman year of college. No, these days I chase down Halloween parades in Historic towns like Occoquan. Here's a sampling... I wish I could still sit on someone's shoulders and nap... just before I arrived back at the office...nice...

The funny thing about being creative (or at least believing yourself to be creative) is that creativity itself comes and goes. There are times when so many ideas clog my head, I have to record them into a notebook or in a word document. Then I spend the next several weeks trying to figure out how to make it happen. The flip side, naturally, are the times when the creative juices aren’t flowing at all. The assignments draw blanks, no new projects come to mind, and I’m left with a slate of unimaginative results. I find that either results in a feed-forward type of cycling. The more creative I feel, the more ideas I generate, the ideas I generate beget more ideas…etc. On the other hand when I’m “slumping” I press more, yielding more blanks, which draws frustration. I go Stuart Smalley on myself and tell myself, “I’m good enough, and people like me…”, or something like it, and I go out and force myself to take a picture, then another, and then I begin to feel better, and I realize th...

It’s the first week of October. For me this has become my de-facto State of the John Boal Photography Union address. The Eddie Adams workshop starts this week. Without me… again. So there it is. I’m Oh for three. You can apply 3 times and that’s it. It's supposed to be for young and/or developing photojournalists. Although I think there is a caveat. I think you can apply as many times as you want as a student and then only 3 times as a pro. I can’t remember if applied as a student the first time or not. Maybe it’s irrelevant. I’m starting to get used to being rejected—current FT employment notwithstanding. I think it’s a good thing to self-evaluate periodically. Hopefully during these moments I can look back at the past year, or several months and see progress. The first couple years of doing this, I was so concerned with seeing better pictures for my portfolio. Now, I’ve found I’m less concerned with having better pictures than making sure that I have an emerging vision on how I s...

Here are some photos from our trip to Hawaii...not much to comment on other than the Big Island is beautiful, and I can't wait to go back... sunset from the lounge at the Keahou Beach Resort Hotel...nice to enjoy Mai Tais while watching this... sunset from the Onizuka Visitors Center at 9200ft on Mauna Kea... even the bathrooms in Hawaii can be nice...here a shaft of light poked through a window at the Hilo airport before our helicopter ride... what I thought was a "spared" home near the volcano, is actually an observation station for scientists...(thanks to the wife for the correction). All the black is lava rock. Akaka Falls, 420 feet... in the forests around Akaka Falls Orchids seemed to drop from the sky... the lovely Alicia Boal... one of the views from our suite at Keauhou Beach Resort... On our way south after the wedding we stopped at Pu'uhonua Honaunau (The Place of Refuge)...here, Charlie talked to us about the old Hawaiian and Polynesian ways of life.....

Get your tickets here! I was going to write about health care and misplaced outrage of these people at the TEA parties, but I won’t. I’m tired of thinking about it, and frankly, I have better pictures to show….of the fair. I love the fair. You can make an argument that it’s silly, expensive, and generally boring once you get past eating a corn dog and riding on the ferris wheel. This was my argument for not going to them for most of my life, other than when my parents took me to the NY state fair as a kid. Carnivals don’t count. They may seem similar but they aren’t. All the games you could ever want to play are here! But now that it’s my job to meet people and relate my experience with them visually to the rest of you, I love the fair. There isn’t a better spot to meet a more disparate population of people--in a good mood, mind you—in the country. Young, old, country, urban, they are all at the fair. Arm in arm at the fair. Incidentally, he had "LOVE" tatooed across bot...

When I first came back from my internship in York PA, I struggled with being a freelancer in DC.    I tried getting work from the wire services.    The nation was in the grip of a compelling presidential primary season.    And I couldn’t find anything to latch onto as a photojournalist.   I wanted to trek out to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, but I came to the conclusion (via some helpful advice from other veteran photogs) that working close to home would be better.    Force myself to work harder for good pictures.    Nevermind I didn’t have the financial wherewithal to actually travel all over the place, there were plenty of pictures within 2 hours of DC.   I traveled to York, PA for the weekend prior to the PA democratic primaries.    Hillary and Obama were campaigning hard in the blue-collar areas of the state.    Having worked as an intern in York, I had some connections and knew I’d be able to make it to several events before the night of the primary.   Sen. Kennedy would...

I’ve mentioned this many times before, probably, but one of the great things about being a photojournalist, is the interesting people you meet. The other day, guitarist and music recording icon, Les Paul, passed away. He was 94. It turned out that there were a couple of men in the area who had personal relationships with the man. Larry Muller, a dentist in the area, and an avid guitarist, has a custom-made Gibson Les Paul guitar signed by Les, “Larry, keep pickin’, Les Paul”, it says. That he had a guitar signed by the legend. But Paul Wolff, his friend, a recording console designer, and founder of Tonelux, had some stories to share about the music recording industry, along with Les himself. What turned out not to be less interesting was the caption on the cover of our next day’s paper: their names ran incorrectly. Doh! I promise that wasn’t my doing. I wrote in my caption that Paul was looking at Larry’s signed guitar, and somehow that evolved into getting the names reversed. So spe...