Hi, I'm Ryan.

I'm 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 and over twenty years performing professionally, including a Gemini Award nomination for writing on Caution: May Contain Nuts and a Sterling Award nomination for my performance in Theatre Networks Infinity, including five months in New York City performing Off-Broadway in Nevermore.

Photography found me the same way, in university, when I started carrying a camera everywhere and pointing it at my friends. Most of those early photos were bad. But every so often I'd catch something that really hit home — to me, to the person in it, 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.

I started shooting headshots out of my garage in 2012, and moved into a dedicated studio in south central Edmonton in 2018. Since then I've photographed thousands of clients, from entrepreneurs and executives to entire corporate teams.

Within Peter Hurley's Headshot Crew, I worked my way up to Associate and then Mentor — helping other photographers become Associates themselves, and speaking at his HeadshotMania convention. I stepped back from that role 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.

Outside the studio, 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.