Behind the Person,
Behind the Camera
I'm Ryan, a photographer based in Plymouth, where I grew up and still live. What keeps me coming back to photography is that it lets me do two things I genuinely love at once, getting to know people, and noticing beautiful things most people walk past. A good portrait session is both of those happening together, learning what makes someone them, and then trying to show it back to them in a way they can truly see.
When I'm not behind a camera, I'm probably climbing, I've been at it for a couple years now and I’m getting quite good at it. I love singing in choir, though I haven't found a new one since graduating. I'm also an Eagle Scout, which introduced me to a ton of people and taught a lot of skills I still lean on. I've got a running board game habit, and I like world building, story writing, and D&D. Jazz has a real hold on me, I could listen to it for hours and not get tired of it. And honestly, more than any of that, I just love teaching people things, showing someone how to do something they've been wanting to figure out is one of my favorite feelings, and it's probably a big part of why this work suits me so well.
The Long, Slightly Ridiculous Road to Actually Learning Photography
My relationship with cameras started a little unusually. My dad handed me his old film SLR when I was seven, and, showing an early gift for missing the point entirely, I took it apart instead of taking a single photo with it. A few years later I grabbed his newer camera and actually tried using it as intended, and got endlessly confused about why shutter speed kept making my photos look strange. That confusion turned into a deep dive once I got older, and I finally figured out what all those settings actually did.
Understanding the mechanics still left me a long way from taking good photos. I found that out the hard way at 14, when I volunteered to shoot my sister's high school graduation and ended up giving up halfway through and switching to auto mode. It wasn't until I took a photography class with Amy Kimball that things really clicked, the weekly assignments gave me a reason to actually practice each piece of it until it stopped feeling like theory and started feeling like fluency.
Since then, photography's mostly stuck around as something I do for the people close to me, friends, family, the occasional vacation. It's only more recently, while figuring out what I actually want to spend my time and effort on, that it's turned into something I want to take further and offer to more people. That's what Framed by Ryan is, a chance to take something I've loved doing casually for years and finally give it the attention it deserves.
