My name is Ryan Downs, I'm currently 18 years old and attending Doss High School. I started photography around the year 2013, it was my sophomore year. It all started when I was placed in a class called "Intro to Media Art" and at that time my main focus was on videography. I enjoyed photography but mostly just to admire, I never thought of myself as a photographer. Making video my focus I purchased a DSLR camera, a Canon Rebel T5. I was focusing on my passion making videos at any opportunity I could, a lot of my teachers said with the camera I had I should try photography, but I decided that it wasn't for me and stuck with making videos. The train of thought I had was photography was something everyone does everyday, I saw it as a everyday casual thing and not art. My media arts teacher later asked me if I would be interested in joining a club called "Skills USA" which is where a group of students from different schools were chosen to represent there school and compete in competitions based on there area of skill. They host several different categories for students such as; Coding, Computer Maintenance, Animation, and many more. One of the categories was photography, and at first I was not thrilled to be doing the photography category but no one else was joining and I had a decent camera so I said yes, plus I thought it would be a fun and cool experience. I never had much practice in PhotoShop so my teacher showed me the basics and I actually really enjoyed it. I still felt the same way about photography it wasn't art it was a everyday casual thing, that changed when I was at a teen leadership program I enrolled in and told my favorite counselor there about what I was doing and what he told me completely changed my opinion on photography. Once I told him he then told me he was a photographer all of a sudden it was cooler to me knowing my favorite counselor did photography, he showed me some of his pictures and I was blown away. He showed me a style of photography called "Long Exposure" and I had never seen anything like it and it was so cool. At that moment I realized photography was more then a "everyday casual" thing it was art. He showed me you can make your images look different by adjusting manual settings and I was fascinated by this because this is where I now see photography has a sense of personal style that I thought it lacked before.

        Shortly after discovering this new hobby my favorite skater/youtuber/photographer started making photography tutorials and i studied them as much as I could and tried to imitate his style, I guess you could say I idolized him. He made a tutorial on long exposure and I gave it a try I thought I would try it on a waterfall like him but couldn't find one, so I tried to take one of the highway of cars passing and after the session of photography I looked at my images and was excited to show my counselor at the teen leadership program but when I looked I was crushed, all my images came out white (over exposed). I quickly decided long exposure wasn't for me.

        I was at the skatepark skating with my best friend and reason I skate Alex, and Alex was trying a couple tricks that where very difficult. He was trying one trick and it was a Judo Kick out of the bowl, I was filming and discouraged from photography but I knew my Skills USA competition was coming up, so I decided to ask Alex if he cared if I switched to pictures and tried to get a picture of it instead. He was okay with that and he tried it a couple times and I decided if he didn't land it this time I would switch back to video, besides all my pictures were blurry. He said he needed a break and grabbed some water and I looked at the pictures, they were blurry so i looked at the lens where the focus ring was, I realized I had auto focus off. I turned it on and set my camera to sports mode and tried again. He landed the trick I got a cool angle and showed him. I remember he said to me when he saw it "Thanks man that looks awesome thats way cooler then a video!" I then started to learn my camera and learned how to use my manual settings so my long exposures wouldn't be to exposed.

        Now was time for the competition, when we arrived they put us in groups and told us our task. My task was to take five images, one to represent each category. The categories were; Education, Safety, Security, Cleanliness, and Intelligence. After wondering around the campus for a few hours taking pictures for each category I returned to the computer room we stared in the women in charge said "Here you are!" and handed me a card reader and I asked what it was for as I was sitting down she said so I can put my pictures on the computer to print out after I edit them. Now I was lost I was sitting there wondering, edit what? I didn't think i needed to edit them they looked fine but I had time to kill so I put the images in PhotoShop and began, I mostly messed with adjustment then got to a image of a girl with a book and remembered something my teacher showed me so I made a selection around her of the background and added a Gaussian Blur and made it look like a really shallow depth of field. I then submitted my work and returned to my teacher and we went back to school unaware of the results till the Skills USA people emailed him.

        The Skills USA people came to our school to present awards and none of my peers or I knew who won and all the other kids got first place in there category. I was nervous then the man presenting awards said my name then paused. I didn't want to hear my place in photography. He then said "First!" I was so excited. After that I continued photography and made it a passion now I am a freelance photographer and I like to think I'm pretty good at it now.