JRYANROBERTS.com is a collection of visual content creation businesses started by Ryan Roberts. Early in his commercial photography career his areas of focus were still life and portrait photography. His love for changing the appearance and perception of objects through the use of light along with his love of photographing people quickly morphed into years of exploration in the realm of beauty photography.
When viewing his beauty work one first notices the attention to detail in the lighting and how it compliments each subject’s individual features. Upon further review the portrait influence of his beauty work comes into focus. Without using the cliche shots with bubble gum, biting nails and lollipops Ryan’s work shows off the beautiful uniqueness of the subjects along with the talent of the make up artists he collaborates with. During his years fine tuning this body of work he developed an expert understanding of light and the art of interacting with his subjects. The hardest part of his beauty assignments was that most clients didn’t want the models to be laughing which was a challenge for Roberts.
When he needed to blow off steam and have some fun with photography Ryan would take on portrait assignments. By sheer coincidence many of his subjects were comics or tied to the comedy industry. This brought a levity to the work that he needed and was a way to share his sense of humor. One of the most valuable aspects of photography was it gave him an ice breaker. Whether it was out in social or on set, photography gave Ryan a comfortable way of saying “Hello” to a stranger. Most people who know him wouldn’t describe him as shy but he has no problem admitting he has a hard time with the first “Hello”.
The Onion (America’s Finest News Source) came across his portrait work when they were looking to hire a photographer for their venture into TV. Over the course of 3 seasons, creating the visuals to accompany the fake news stories, he learned invaluable lessons about photo compositing. Those days on set were logistically challenging and presented many obstacles that had to be overcome. This experience helped develop his “can-do” problem solving approach. He loved the process of creating something out of nothing and at the time had no idea how much the photo compositing would influence his next steps.
Being a restless creative he found himself wanting to take on a new challenge but wasn’t sure what. He had an inclination of staying up late into the night where he found comfort in the lack of distractions. At night, there was an invaluable silence from all the distractions the day presented. There was no phone to answer, no emails to respond to, no social media to eat up his time and most importantly no feeling of guilt that he wasn’t doing enough business development.
After a couple of years he had sizable bodies of work from all these late nights. Not wanting to distract commercial clients with his creative work he knew it needed to be spun off into a business solely for those pieces. After pondering what to call this new endeavor it dawned on him the unifying aspect of these diverse bodies of work was the simple fact each piece started with him staring at a blank screen. Not only did this help him decide on the name Blank Screen Creatives but it helped him better understand his creative process.
Blank Screen Creatives became his experimental outlet and shortly after the launch of the website a couple of pieces were purchased for the permanent collection of the Andaz 5th Ave Hotel. This purchase coupled with the hotel commissions that followed were exactly what he needed to keep pushing on with his late night explorations into his imagination.
As he was working on the body of work that would become TAG NYC he realized each piece advanced his knowledge of both photography and photoshop. Soon he found himself able to accomplish things he had always dreamed of and he realized a photographer who was able to master composition, lighting and post production of images was now only held back by their imagination. He was both terrified and excited as hell with that realization. Moving forward Blank Screen Creatives’ motto would be “Imagine Then Execute” and anyone who understands the meaning of those words was welcome to join him on this journey.
Ryan works out of NYC and is available worldwide for commercial and artistic commissions.