I’m a photographer, writer, woodworker, skier and backpacker living in Boise, Idaho.

Photography

I’ve been making photographs since the 1980s. I studied at Brooks Institute of Photography from 1995 to 1998, back when film was a mystery you solved one mistake at a time. Brooks is gone now. It closed in 2016.

At Brooks I photographed everything: houses, babies, Tide detergent, landscapes. I didn’t know what any of it was for. Then one summer I visited my wife’s grandmother in Wendell, Idaho. On the wall between her living room and kitchen hung the senior portraits of her ten children, framed and hung in birth order. Decades old and priceless to her. I knew right then what I wanted to do.

I built a portrait studio in Boise, sold it in 2005, and bought a bigger one in San Juan Capistrano, California. When the housing crisis hit in 2008, most of my revenue disappeared in a few weeks. By 2009 I’d lost everything. I came home to Boise bankrupt and I stopped making portraits. It hurt too much.

Starting over

My youngest brother was graduating from college into the same bad economy and couldn’t find work. So we started a company together. That company became Page One Power, and I still help run it. I’m also a co-owner of Outdoor Empire, where we make gear reviews and outdoor videos for the common man.

The camera came back too, pointed somewhere new. These days I photograph the land within a day’s drive of home: river canyons, farm roads, ridgelines I’ve driven under a hundred times. I’m working on a book of those photographs and short prose called My Private Idaho.

This blog

This is where I put down what I see. Photographs made close to home, and small true stories about life with my family. I post here most days

You can see and buy my fine art prints at jonballphotography.com, and you can get new posts by email on Substack.