Meet the Photographer Behind the Lens
Ryan Schaffer Bio
With adventure, curiosity, and wonder running through my veins for as long as I can remember, nature, animals, and the underwater world have always fascinated me. Growing up in landlocked Colorado, I had no immediate access to the ocean but loved watching shows and reading picture books (before the internet days) to look at all the bizarre creatures. My favorite marine animal was the whale shark, and on land I was obsessed with snakes. I would literally run home from elementary school just to watch The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau (and Power Rangers, off topic).
Hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean, I was already developing an attachment to it. Those shows gave my imagination somewhere to go, somewhere extraordinary that existed beyond the mountains and familiar boundaries of my childhood. Steve Irwin brought that same excitement to wildlife, and I spent countless weekends outdoors catching, releasing, and sometimes keeping snakes. That fascination became part of my personality, eventually growing into community snake relocation in Florida.
I began scuba diving in 2007 while serving in the United States Air Force in San Antonio, Texas.
Canyon Lake and Medina Lake were murky, humble beginnings but served as excellent low-visibility training and, more importantly, opened the door to a hobby that had never occurred to me before: underwater photography. On my first dive after completing my open water certification, I brought a waterproof disposable camera along with me. I had almost no understanding of photography. I knew only that there were things happening underwater that I wanted to remember and that verbally describing the details afterward wasn’t enough. One of those early photographs shows a mega-sized, giant catfish disappearing into the murky water. Please see the attached photo of that “beautiful” catfish, taken with a disposable camera, lol.
The following year, during a difficult period in my life, diving gave me something I hadn’t gone looking for. I finally saw the ocean for the first time at age 22 during a diving adventure to Hurghada, Egypt, to explore the Red Sea. Beneath the surface, I found stillness and calmness. The stressors that occupied so much of my attention on land seemed to recede, and I could become absorbed in the life around me. I came to value that feeling deeply. My connection to the underwater world became more personal, and so did the photographs. They held memories of underwater environments I’d explored, but also of how it felt to have a little peace when I needed it.
Over a 20-year Air Force career, I lived in Germany, England, Turkey, Japan, Texas, California, Florida, and Nevada. Each assignment placed me within reach of unfamiliar landscapes, cultures, and wildlife. Diving and photography became part of how I experienced those regions, and my interests gradually carried the camera beyond the water. I found myself photographing mountains and coastlines, animals and landscapes, building a collection that reflected the life I was living and the things I cared enough to stop and notice.
I’ve always felt that my camera has a better memory than I do. Time can leave you with a broad impression of an environment while quietly taking away its particulars. A photograph holds onto them: the texture of a reef, an animal’s expression, or the cascade colors along a coastline. Looking through those images’ years later, I often find more details through each glance, and the feeling of being right back there.
After retiring from the Air Force, I looked back through nearly two decades of photographs across many oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, countries, counties, fissures, and parks. All those moments have been sitting unseen and collecting dust on my archived hard drives. I have mostly used this hobby to post on social media, with a few prints (and even a gallery arrangement in a pediatrics clinic), but I wanted to give them a lasting presence in homes, offices, and public buildings.
That became Adventure Imagery. There’s a particular satisfaction in seeing a photograph become a print that someone chooses to live with or decorate an office with. An experience that once belonged only to me can become something another person returns to, enjoys, and finds their own meaning in.
I hope these photographs offer the same wonder and excitement that I felt capturing them. The animals and natural environments in them contain so many memories and profoundly opened my perception of the world and gave me purpose and the desire for continued exploration. Sharing that is personal. If I can inspire even just one person, or spark an interest in nature, animals, and the underwater world, then my mission is complete. Join me into the abyss and across the terrestrial domains of Adventure Imagery. – Ryan Schaffer