Jay Ryser Photography

Welcome to my modest little place on the web, and thanks for checking out my work. I spend my weekends and vacations getting up hours before the sun, gasping for breath at 14,000ft, getting blasted by 60mph winds, or tromping around for hours in deep snow - all as a hobby.

By weekday, I'm a licensed mental health clinician (specializing in Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Dialectical Behavior Therapy), working in a psychiatric day treatment program. In the evenings and weekends, I'm a passionate nature photographer. I moved to Colorado in 2000 ("livin' the dream"), and now wonder what ever took me so long to get here.

My main photography love is wildlife, and I'm fortunate to not only live in an area with lots of wildlife, but I'm only a few miles from what was one of the premier red fox locations in North America (as evidenced by my way too many fox images). In making wildlife images, my goal is to not just capture an image of an animal, a member of that species, but to capture something unique, a bit of the individual personality of that animal and their habitat in the image. To get to know the animal, I spend lots of time revisiting the same areas, getting to know individual animals, getting to know their habits, their preferences, and their unique personalities, so that I can best accomplish my goal.

This is a return to photography for me. I still have my old Canon T70 and some manual focus lenses, but as a poor undergraduate and then graduate student, the cost of film and processing was just too much, and photography took a backseat to other interests. Digital imaging is a welcome change.

I’m currently using Sony Alphas – a580 and most commonly shoot with either a:
Sony 70-400 G
180mm F/3.5 Macro
300mm f/2.8 with and without a 1.4Teleconverter
50mm f/1.4
Sony HVL-F58AM Flash with Better Beamer
Sigma EM140DG Ring Flash

All images shot in RAW and processed in Adobe Lightroom and the Nik software suite. I tend to do very little in the way of post-processing - all post-processing is corrective or restorative, no major image manipulation is ever done. I NEVER add any elements to my images and only rarely clone anything out. The image you're seeing is pretty close to what I saw when I took it.

All wildlife photos represent wild animals in their natural habitat unless specified otherwise in the description. Images in the STOCK folder are already exclusively licensed by stock agencies and are only available via the agency. All other images are available as fine art prints (including metal prints that I think surpass paper prints by a wide margin, and canvas wraps) as well as exclusive and non-exclusive stock use as JPEG, TIFF, and DNG formats.

Please note that the watermark seen on images online is NOT present on prints or electronic files, it is only applied online as a theft-preventative measure.

Links
Front Range Wildlife Photographers

Pro Nature Photographer

Nature Images Online Magazine

Nature Photographers Network

What The Duck

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