Profile Spotlight: Ryan Marshall

[Profile Spotlights]

This week... blogger and photographer Ryan Marshall. Check out Ryan's blog: http://pacingthepanicroom.blogspot.com/

Who are you and what is your profession?
My name is Ryan Marshall and I am a blogger who accidentally blogged his way into a photography career after the success of a maternity series that I created documenting my wife’s pregnancy exploded on the net. I love that I was able to find success in a field I love, simply by making pictures of one of the most incredible experiences of my life, watching my wife grow our first baby.

 

Can you tell us a little about your background, inspiration, and heroes?
I grew up on the West Coast of Florida right smack on a little man made island in the Gulf of Mexico called Venice, FL. I have always had a natural resistance to formal schooling so I suffered along the way, I was a real flunker. Until I fell into some film work with Florida filmmaker Victor Nunez (Ruby in Paradise, Ulee’s Gold), I existed solely in the Art Dept, but being a property master kept me close to camera and the DP, and my love for photography really grew from these early experiences of watching the relationship to the sets I was helping
construct, to seeing the images composed in the video assist monitors, to the final produced image.

I was really fortunate to be in Florida and find myself surrounded by a great bunch of mentors, and all of this solidified when I worked on a film called Coast Lines which starred Josh Brolin, who spent much of his free time photographing the “Forgotten Coast” or (the FL Pan Handle) where we were filming. It was those images and his friendship that really led me into wanting to do photography full tilt, and with the money I made on that film I bought my first “real” camera soon after moving to Los Angeles.

I got a little side tracked in the music industry and tour managing, but used all that time on the road across America, Canada, Australia, and a personal trip to Japan to really open my eyes up to the world through the lens of a camera and taught myself how to shoot. I put all of my fantasies of being a filmmaker on hold and focused on making memorable photography. It wasn’t until very recently with the release of the Canon 7D and 5D that I even began to consider getting back to the original lure of telling peoples stories through moving pictures. So all of this is very new to me.

 
I don’t have a big body of work to pull from, I just have the excitement of being able to roll on a subject past the initial still shot, and hear their voice and experiences, and it is truly exciting for me. The first projects I am putting together are based along the Gulf of Mexico, they are assignments that came together from Fast Company after an editor there saw some of the stills I was bringing back from the Coast. For me it is a real getting back to my roots endeavor, my fascination with documentary work, and this is the region I grew up in, and have fallen in love with the further up the coast I traveled. 

What do you feel you want to shoot on 10.10.10?

I feel like I can’t make this decision yet, as I am convinced that by the time 10.10.10 draws nearer, my view of the world from these new assignments and experiences will pull my heart to a story that I think needs to be told. It is a day in the life project, and having the recent chance to meet so many people along the coast as they try and find new ways to get through their days I am sure the lends will end up settling along the coast somewhere.

Why is this important to you?

I feel like this is important because every time I shoot any little part of the Gulf I feel like I might be capturing a little glimpse of a vanishing world.