The Owls of Montara Mountain
In March came the virus but also came the owls. Two fuzzy-white great horned owls. At first we thought they were alone in the nest near the ranger’s house. I happened to have a camera with me with a powerful…
A Bigger Camera
by Darin Boville
A Bigger Camera
by Darin Boville
Darin Boville
Was Ansel Adams A Landscape Photographer?
If you google “greatest landscape photographer” and expect to hit a link for Ansel Adams you would be wrong. You get a page of click-bait links, all with numbers in the titles: 25 Best Landscape Photographers Of All Time, The…
Book Review: How He Became Ansel Adams—A Review of Senf’s Making a Photographer (Part Two)
(This review of Rebecca Senf’s Making a Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams appears in two parts. This is part two. Part one can be found here.) If a deep dive into the Parmelian Prints wasn’t treat enough (or…
Book Review: How He Became Ansel Adams—A Review of Senf’s Making a Photographer (Part One)
(This review of Rebecca Senf’s Making a Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams appears in two parts. This is part one. Part two can be found here.) Rebecca Senf’s book on Ansel Adams, Making a Photographer, is a treasure…
The Magic Trick
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with a sentence. As I lay there a second sentence will come, then a third. Then I can sort of see the whole thing laid out like I’m on a…
Another Try at the Serpent Mound
It’s two hours out of the way along small highways, heading directly south of Columbus. Despite growing up in Ohio, and coming back to visit every year, I’d never heard of the town of Peebles. That’s not as surprising as…
An Ancient Circle In Central Ohio
It doesn’t look like much at first but it is astonishing nonetheless. A rampart of earth, grass-covered with trees here and there rises up before you, a gap in the rampart beckoning you in. And you go in, and it’s…
It’s October, Again. Yeehaw!
It's Halloween month and who can resist a couple of animated, Chinese-made, plastic skeleton hillbillies dueling away on their banjos as is their wont?
New Work: The Geyser
Not only will I write about travel and photography on these pages but from time to time I’ll share my own work. This is The Geyser, from earlier this year. It is a ten-minute video of the Old Faithful geyser…
A Wrong Turn to the Flight 93 Memorial
There’s something wrong with the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania. I had taken a wrong turn and was trapped on the wrong highway through the endless forests of Pennsylvania when I passed a brown sign for the memorial. Oh, that’s…