Ryan Joseph: From Football Star to Award-Winning Wedding Photographer

When Ryan Joseph was recruited to play football at Ohio University, little did he know that he was enrolling at...

By Aimee Baldridge | Published Mar 5, 2013 12:36 AM EST

When Ryan Joseph was recruited to play football at Ohio University, little did he know that he was enrolling at a school with a top photography program. Four years later, he left Ohio with a photography degree in hand, eventually settling in Tampa and opening his own studio. Joseph works in a fine art style, but relishes drawing on a wide variety of skills to achieve it. “A wedding photographer has to be a little bit of everything,” he observes. “You’ve got to be a photojournalist, a portrait artist, a storyteller—sometimes you’ve got to be a psychologist.”

When it comes time for portraits, Joseph puts on his director’s hat, making careful compositions that use natural light. He also brings an attentiveness to his subjects that allows their personalities and presence to determine the look of the images. “The point of a portrait is exposing who that person is on their wedding day,” he explains. The enduring quality of those pictures, Joseph says, comes from bringing out the genuineness in his subjects. “I want them to be as classic 20 years from now as they are today,” he says. And the job never gets old for Joseph. “Every time I think I’ve seen it all, something else happens at a wedding,” he says. “It keeps me on my toes.”

See the rest of our Best Wedding Photographers of 2013 list here.