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Del Ryder

              And The Winding Road

It seems I was born with a sense of curiosity. My father said that as far back as he could remember I was “full of questions”. During my high school years he bought a set of encyclopedias. He thought I'd find some answers there, but I hardly ever used them.

My curiosity was experiential and mostly visual; seeing and discovering things for myself. As a kid, I spent my free time hiking in forests or wading through swamps in upstate New York just to see what was there. For my twelfth birthday, I begged for a microscope and my grandmother bought it for me. What I saw in one drop of swamp water was amazing. It was home for about a dozen Hydra. Then I wondered what I might see in distant places. I mowed lawns in the summer and shoveled driveways in the winter to buy a telescope. My first memorable image with it was of a boy delivering newspapers riding down the middle of a street one-handed throwing newspapers into his customers front yards. He was in another town, ten miles away. When I found Saturn and its rings in the night sky, I ran into the house to get my father, but by the time we got back to the telescope Saturn was long gone. To this day, I still wish he could have seen it. It was beautiful, but it was also an amazing moment of perspective I'll never forget. 

A high school camera club formed in my senior year. Two of my friends joined and encouraged me to join. It made sense to me. I had a microscope and a telescope and there were special fittings available to mount a camera to them, so I planned to record some of the extraordinary things I was seeing. I also planned to photograph things I was discovering on my nature walks. So, I went with my friends to an after school session, but the teacher said the club was filled to maximum with six students all sharing one camera. That was disappointing, but on the positive side, I took two semesters of mechanical drawing that year and learned how to use linear perspective to create a sense of depth and three dimensional space on a flat piece of paper. That training placed me further along the learning curve with respect to composition and design when I bought a camera a few years later.

 

After graduating high school, I moved around a bit. I lived in Indianapolis for two years, Mountain View, California for a year and Japan for a year and a half. I bought my first camera in Naha, Okinawa Prefecture, Japan.

 

Aware that high quality lenses are critical for imaging, my camera had to have a good lens, so I bought a Minolta SRT~101with a 50mm 1.4 lens. The only resources for learning available to me then were camera magazines and I  especially liked CAMERA, the Swiss magazine, that included informative interviews with leading fine art photographers worldwide. From those magazines, I learned to use creative camera techniques to enhance my photographs: like color [a harbinger of emotion], framing, design [especially the arrangement of spaces and objects within my frame], linear and aerial perspective and depth of field effects. Those techniques helped me create a novel version of any subject I was attracted to. And what attracted me were images aligned with what I was feeling and thinking about at that time in my life. Riffing with my camera resulted in photographs that reflected my interpretation of a world very different from my own. Those explorations of life using a camera were engaging, fun and my general level of awareness grew. Not only was I learning more about the world; I was also learning more about myself through photography simply by my choice of subject matter, the way I captured and formed the images and then viewing my prints. It was a classic feedback loop. My camera became a vehicle; a way for me to use photography to merge my ideas and feelings with the world; with the people, places and things I was encountering in my life. It was a type of documentary photography and it was personal. I learned quite a bit on my own with my Minolta and a normal lens, but knew I had to learn more, especially on the darkroom and processing side of photography, so I applied to Syracuse University. The university had two distinct tracts for photography and I selected courses from both.

I completed advanced courses in photography from the College of Visual and Performing Arts and the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications/Journalism. After graduation my life as a photographer seemed to develop very quickly. I taught fine art photography for the State University of New York at the Tompkins/ Cortland Campus as an Adjunct Professor of Photography. I began to photograph in the New England area on several road trips and exhibited those photographs extensively in the US and Canada. I accepted the position as Director for PhotoVisions, a fine art photography gallery in NY and curated eight fine art photography exhibitions during my term of office. I met with the Director of the Everson Museum of Art in NY to show him my recently completed series of new color photography. At the conclusion of the meeting he invited me to exhibit that series of twenty hand printed color photographs at the museum. After the exhibit a few of the photographs from the series entered the museum's collection.

 

I was using 4x5 and 8x10 view cameras for much of my fine art work, so it felt very natural to begin freelancing as an architectural photographer. Within a year my client base was large enough to open a studio for corporate, architectural and product photography accounts. At SU, I had learned to process and print black and white and color film and photographs, so I installed a darkroom with Omega and Beseler 4x5 enlargers off my main studio to maintain the highest quality possible for my clients. I also provided portrait and fashion photography services at the studio.

 

Encouraged by success in working with advertising agencies representing local businesses, I moved to the West Coast to open an advertising photography studio in Irvine, California to serve national and international clients. I won several awards for advertising photography from ADDOC, the Art Directors and Designers of Orange County at their annual awards ceremonies. With a strong portfolio of portrait and fashion photographs from New York, I also worked with Los Angeles and Orange County talent agents to enhance their models professional portfolios.

 

My photography experiences are diverse. They include portrait photography, landscape photography, architectural photography, fashion photography and advertising photography. Most of the photographs on this site are examples of my fine art photography. Working as a professional commercial photographer has had an influence on my fine art photography. For example, one of its influences can be seen in my attraction to saturated color. My fine art photography is completely different from my commercial photography, however, as it has always given me the freedom to express my own personal reactions, feelings and relationships to the people, places and things I have experienced in my life. With regard to fine art photography, I am mindful and work without preconceptions. I value discovery, learning and finding meaning in the ordinary, everyday things that trigger emotion.

I live in Huntington Beach, California. I'm out with my digital camera almost every day. My top priority as a fine art photographer is to keep an open agenda toward subject matter and maintain a relaxed, mindful state of attention. Fine art photography has always been a perfect fit and an all- encompassing passion for me. There are over 300 photographs on this site and I post new fine art photographs frequently. I hope you enjoy viewing the photographs as much as I enjoyed taking them.

 

A partial client list of advertising photography accounts include the following: Allergan, Apple Macintosh, Avis, Beatrice Hunt-Wesson, Bentley Mills, Breyers, Coca Cola, Del Mar Avionics, FireTrac, F.X. Matt Brewing Co, ICN Pharmaceuticals, Ingram Micro, Knudsen, Lawry's, Marathon Inc, Northrup Grumman, Philips Electronics, Quantum Health Resources, Ocean Pacific Swimwear, Orange Coast Magazine, Taco Bell, and TRW.

 

I hold BA ( Psychology ) and  MS ( Counseling ) degrees from Syracuse University.

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