Hi, I’m Ryan.A headshot photographer in Edmonton specializing in corporate, business, and team headshots — with a focus on images that hold up on LinkedIn, a company website, or a boardroom wall.

I count myself lucky on a regular basis. Is it actual luck? I really have no idea. Up until recently, I haven’t been very retrospective about my life or how it all came to be the way it is. With the recent addition of another child to my family and the ever-approaching number fifty down the pike… retrospection is something that just seems inevitable now, if not a tad cliché.

I didn’t grow up in the arts — I fell into acting in my last year of high school because I needed three more credits to graduate, and Drama was the easiest option on the list. That small, unplanned decision turned into two professional acting programs, a BFA in Acting from the University of Alberta and training at Grant MacEwan (now MacEwan University), and 20 years performing professionally, on stage and in TV shows, commercials and web series. That includes a Gemini Award nomination (now the Canadian Screen Awards) for my writing on Caution: May Contain Nuts, a sketch comedy show I also acted in, and a Sterling Award nomination for my performance in Theatre Network’s Infinity. I toured with Catalyst Theatre’s Nevermore: The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe across Canada, to New York twice, including five months Off-Broadway, and to London, and you can still watch the film version online.

I’ve played every theatre in Edmonton, including the Citadel Theatre, Theatre Network, Teatro La Quindicina at the Varscona Theatre and the Mayfield Dinner Theatre. I went on to teach auditioning at Grant MacEwan as a sessional instructor for five years or more, and I’m a regular guest in the U of A BFA’s professional development class, talking about headshots and what it’s actually like to be an actor. I’ve directed for the screen too, second unit on web content for Caution: May Contain Nuts and a web series. Between my kids and the studio, I keep it low-key now, but I still dip my toes in when time allows, helping playwrights with readings of their new plays and directing.

Photography found me the same way, in university, when I started carrying a camera everywhere. For a year I posted a photo every day: landscapes, macros, light painting, anything I could think of. Most of those photos were bad. But the portraits were the ones that hit home, to me, to the person in them, and to everyone who knew them, and I’ve been chasing that dragon ever since.

As an actor, authenticity is the whole game. Twenty years on stage and screen, all spent chasing the same thing: the moment something real comes through instead of an act. That training is what I actually bring into a headshot session. I’m not just operating a camera — I know how to put someone at ease, read the room, and recognize the second an expression stops being performed and starts being them.

Both of my training programs, at MacEwan and the University of Alberta, came down to truth: telling an authentic moment from a forced one. I use that every day. On the screen, I can show you why one expression feels wrong and another feels like you, and most of the time the difference is tension. Acting also taught me empathy: standing in someone else’s shoes and understanding why they feel the way they do. So when someone walks in dreading this, I know the dread is about the camera, and we can work with that. It taught me to take notes without taking them personally. If I love a frame and you don’t, it’s gone, and we keep going. And it made me a storyteller. A headshot is a different kind of story, and everything I learned about telling a good one still applies.

I started shooting headshots out of my garage in 2012, and moved into a dedicated studio in south central Edmonton in 2018. All told I’ve photographed more than 4,000 people, from entrepreneurs and executives to entire corporate teams.

In Peter Hurley’s Headshot Crew, I’m an Associate and a former Mentor. As a Mentor I helped other photographers become Associates themselves, and spoke at his HeadshotMania convention. I stepped back from mentoring as my business and my family got busier: at the time we only had one kid, and he was still a baby. What I learned there still shows up in every session I shoot today, and Peter and I still keep in touch. My own sessions lean on that acting background, simple, conversational, and focused on the moment an expression stops feeling performed, and you see every frame on the screen as we go.

I’m a dad first — my wife and I now have two young kids. When I’m not shooting or answering an email, you’ll find me with my kids, buried in a book (226 last year, mostly genre-hopping fiction with a soft spot for sci-fi), or — once the snow clears — out biking, hiking, or camping as a family.

If you’re ready for a headshot that actually looks like you on your best day, get in touch. Based in Edmonton, and available for work in Calgary and throughout Alberta.