Zach Ancell

My path to becoming a photographer is nothing you would consider ordinary or traditional, and maybe that accounts for my non-traditional style of photography. I didn’t have a camera handed down to me by my father or grandfather or try to document my life through pictures. I didn’t attend an art school or get a degree in photography. I picked up a camera for the first time in late 2008 in order to take a step back from my life and get myself out of my everyday life.

From that point on, my life became engulfed in photography. At first, like any person trying something new, I sucked. I was trying to create images out of subjects and locations that had no appeal or interest to me. As my passion for photography grew, I started looking for different paths and forms of photography to spark my interest. Eventually, this led to my first big break as a photographer, HDR images.

It seemed that my photography went from dull and boring, to interesting and exciting overnight (well at least it seemed that way to an amateur photographer). My HDR imagery led to an internship with a Chicago based advertising company where I shot dozens of HDR Car images to be used for web and print advertising. Within 9-months of beginning photography, I was already having my images published and used to promote companies.

After that, I searched for other ways to peak my interest in photography. I took my knowledge of HDR photography and my love of creating vivid and dramatic images and tried to approach another sector of photography, Sports Portraits. Sportraits were a way to fuse my longtime passion for sports into my newfound love of photography. It began as an experiment photographing my former track teammates in my living room but ultimately resulted in a full-fledged photo campaign for the 2010 University of Oregon’s Track and Field team.

As I continue to grow as a photographer and as a person, my style will be impacted and change for the better. I will draw on my past influences, my photographic heroes and my dynamic approach that got me to where I am today. My ultimate goal is to continue creating something different and unique and to never be confined by the term “traditional”.