BEHIND THE LENS

​

I'm Ashley Rappleyea. I earned a Bachelor's degree from BYU-Idaho in Art Education with a minor in Journalism Education.

 

I grew up in the Rogue Valley and have been taking pictures since I got my first camera in 3rd grade. It was a purple Mickey Mouse camera that took 110 film (you know, the little cartridge that looked like mini binoculars?).

 

I'll admit, my pictures looked like a 3rd grader took them for a long time; well beyond my 3rd grade year. But I kept at it, developing my film with any allowance I earned. Sometimes I used my pictures for drawings I would do.

 

It wasn't until high school that I really got into photography. A friend of mine took summer classes at Parsons School of Design in NYC and then taught me how to really take pictures and manipulate settings. This is where I became more passionate about my work.

 

The next year I enrolled in photography classes and was recruited to work on the high school newspaper and even had some of them published in the yearbook.

 

I went off to college and got onto the campus newspaper there, but as a reporter. I was a terrible reporter in the beginning and shy, if you can believe that. I quit my job as a reporter, but the editor-in-chief called me in for a chat. When he found out I had wanted to be a photographer all along he said, "Well. why didn't you just ask?"

 

So I asked, and that week I got assigned a big gig after a fellow photog had to cancel: the Contemporary Dance Theater performance! One of my photos landed on the front page of the Entertainment section (above the fold and in color!) and was named Photo of the Week. I was hooked. It was like artistic crack.